Tag: Disease

Articles

Impregnable friendship : locating desire in the middle English ‘Amis and Amiloun’

Scholarship on Amis and Amiloun has generally been divided into two critical schools. The majority of critics have read the work as an exemplar of perfect friendship, overlooking (or ignoring) any trace of homoeroticism, citing the possibility itself as anachronistic, or explaining away its presence by offering historical or theoretical justification for intimacy among medieval men.

Articles

Paget’s disease in an Anglo-Saxon

A recently excavated skeleton from an Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Jarrow Monastery is described.Virtually all the bones are abnormal, having the morphological and radiological features of Paget’s disease.It is one of the most convincing examples in the annals of palaeopathology and confirms the antiquity of this condition.

A skull from the East Smithfield plague pits in London, located under what is now the Royal Mint. Researchers announced today that they have sequenced the entire genome of the Black Death, one of the most devastating epidemics in human history. Photo by Museum of London
Articles

The Lived Experience of the Black Death

To appreciate the importance of the biological effects of disease on a society’s lived experience, it can be useful to look at modern examples. Polio provides an excellent example. Children who survive an infection of polio – and escape the neurological incapacitation that can result in disability up to paraplegia – have a fifty percent chance of suffering the similar effects of post-polio syndrome later in life.