(by Maria Emilia Bonaccorso).
Arthrosis literally brought many
ancient inhabitants of the Eternal City to their knees, making
backs and joints ache with a pain that no modern-day patient has
to suffer.
The disorder usually set in around age 30 due to the labor
that their skeletons were subjected to.
There was neither prevention nor cure.
Fractures were brought together without any sort of
surgical intervention and joints were caged in a wooden
structure while waiting to heal.
The largest ever study of its sort on over 2,000 skeletons
- by a team including two orthopedic surgeons, two radiologists
and two medical historians - has been published in "Bones:
Orthopaedic Pathologies in Roman Imperial Age".
The book was presented by the orthopedic oncologist Andrea
Piccioli, editor-in-chief of the Giornale Italiano di Ortopedia
e Traumatologia, the Italian Orthopedic and Traumatology Society
Società (SIOT) secretary and member of the scientific committee
of the Higher Institute of Health.
The scholar was in charge of the study alongside the
orthopedic surgeon Dr. Maria Silvia Spinelli as well as Carla
Caldarini and Federica Zavaroni (anthropologists) and Silvia
Marinozzi (medical historian).
The work is unprecedented in scientific literature in
terms of the number of subjects taken into consideration, which
were found in several excavation campaigns in the underground
necropolises of the capital, with photographic exams integrated
with modern imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CAT)
scans to find to lesions that were previously impossible to
detect.
''Some of the finds seemed so particular to us that they
could not but have assumed good knowledge of bone treatment
techniques. It thus seemed important to us to seek collaboration
with medical historians to understand and analyze the evolution
of medical and orthopedic knowledge of Imperial Rome,'' Piccioli
said.
''We have got a glimpse of a distant time that showed us
men and illnesses that surprised us and sometimes touched us.
''These were men and women used to living and working with
painful, debilitating pathologies. We today can't even imagine
what it must have been like,'' he said.
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