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The Study of Ancient Bone Remains
Abstract
Bio-archaeological studies and historical documents are a great tool to reconstruct the lifestyle and health conditions of the ancient populations, and to understand the correlation between man and the environment over the course of time. The Anthropological Service has taken part in the environmental protection activity of the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Colosseo, il Museo Nazionale Romano e l'Area Archeologica di Roma. This has contributed to outline the biological history of Roman society, in particular that of the Imperial age. In the last decades, new excavation methods applied to the human skeletal remains have helped to collect valuable information on Roman sepulchres, especially those found in the Suburb, because of the large number of civil buildings built after the urban development. These data, together with those deriving from in-depth laboratory investigation, are helping to understand the complex biological landscape of the ancient Roman population with its bio demographic and social processes.
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The social history of medicine over the last fifteen years has redrawn the boundaries of medical history. Specialised papers and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of how medicine has affected society and how society has shaped medicine. This book synthesises, through a series of essays, some of the most significant findings of this 'new social history' of medicine. The period covered ranges from ancient Greece to the present time. While coverage is not exhaustive, the reader is able to trace how medicine in the West developed from an unlicensed open market place, with many different types of practitioners in the classical period, to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalised medicine of State influence, of hospitals, public health medicine, and scientific medicine. The book also covers innovatory topics such as patient-doctor relationships, the history of the asylum, and the demographic background to the history of medicine.
By the second century AD, trepanation (άvάτρησις) was an established procedure for dealing with skull fracture and its consequences. The foremost physician of Western Antiquity, Galen of Pergamum (129–ca 216 AD) employed trepanation in such cases. However, Galen also used the techniques of trepanation to good effect as part of a range of experiments which were undertaken to determine the function of the ventricles in his physiology of the brain. The purpose of this paper is to outline the role of trepanation in these experiments.
