Morbidity and mortality of leprosy in the Middle Ages
October 3, 2017 by Jenna Marshall
During the Middle Ages, nearly everyone in Europe was exposed to the disfiguring, painful and ostracizing disease of leprosy. But did contracting the disease necessarily increase a person's chances of dying?
"You'd think it would be a shut case," says ASU-SFI Center Postdoctoral Fellow Mike Price, an author on a new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. "But interpreting archaeological data is tricky. Archaeologists must study the bones of people who have died, and dead people are not representative of the living. It's like making conclusions about modern, healthy people by observing sick people in hospitals." The paper lays out a model that offers a way to explore both morbidity—contracting a disease—and mortality—dying from it—through a unique data set of bones recovered from a rural monastery in Denmark.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-morbidity-mortality-leprosy-middle-ages.html#jCp
