Geographies and Archaeologies of Health and Disease

The intention of this group is to use a variety of methodologies to investigate their common interests. The disciplines are bioarchaeology, history and historical geography, giving rich perspectives on key themes in ill-health: bodies, environment, place.

The physical implications of disease are represented in the work of Professor Charlotte Roberts and Professor Peter Atkins. Roberts has considered health and disease in Britain from prehistory to the present using skeletal evidence and has integrated this data with social, political and economic contexts. They have both written extensively on tuberculosis: Roberts on the disease generally and with specific reference to skeletal evidence; Atkins on documentary evidence of tuberculosis as a zoonotic disease spread through the food supply. Their future plans remain focused on bodies-diseases-environments.

Professor Atkins will continue with his research on the intersection of systems of food provision and the history of medicine. He is presently writing two books resulting from his Wellcome Research Leave Fellowship, and is planning two further edited books and a journal special issue. He is also extending his conceptual work on food history and is keen generally to press the role of social theory in the history of medicine.

Professor Roberts is investigating disability in the past using a multidisciplinary approach, and has a strong interest in developing her research on air quality and health from prehistory to the post-medieval period. She is writing a book on the bioarchaeology of leprosy funded by the Leverhulme Trust as a Major Research Fellowship, and has an AHRC funded project focusing on the health and welfare of the people buried at the early medieval site of Bamburgh Castle in Northumbria. She has a NERC grant to look at the biomolecular archaeology of TB, along with Professor Terry Brown of the University of Manchester. Using ancient DNA analysis of bone samples from skeletons showing tuberculosis the research will analyse the strains of tuberculosis prevalent through time in Britain and parts of Europe, ultimately comparing strains with data generated at Arizona State University on skeletal samples pre and post-contact. Professor Roberts also has a British Academy project on pre-Columbian syphilis in Hull, using stable isotope analysis to compare those people identified treponematosis buried in the cemetery compared to those without. Two other projects are ongoing. First, Charlotte is writing a Health of Medieval English Women, jointly with Professor Anne Grauer of Loyola University, Chicago, and Dr Pam Graves of Durham University. Second, she is the UK coordinator of a project entitled the ‘Global History of Health’. The aim of this is to document the health and well-being of people from prehistory to the early modern period in Europe using a standard web based recording system, integrating health and disease data with socio-cultural-ecological information. There are strong methodological links between Roberts’ work and the bioarchaeological research of Dr Kirsi Lorentz, who is an expert in the history and archaeology of body-modification, especially of practices of head-shaping in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean.

Professor Jeremy Boulton’s Wellcome-funded socio-demographical project on ‘Death, disease and the environment, 1747-1825’ (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/) is intended as a street level investigation of urban disease patterns. It enables the testing of links between environment and housing quality and the incidence of infectious disease suggested by John Landers. The method is to use the detailed Sexton’s Notebooks of the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields to uncover disease patterns at the micro-historical level of the street and family. One outcome of the project is to map the causes of death given in the Sexton’s notebooks on three detailed contemporary street maps of the area (1746, 1799, 1820) using GIS technology. It is also be possible to link the persons dying with the admission and discharge books of the St Martin’s Workhouse, already digitised as part of an earlier project, which will, in many cases, enable ‘patient histories’ to be reconstructed. The data can be compared at the both the macro and micro level to the numerical data in the London Bills of Mortality.

Since each entry supplies information about the age, residence, cost of burial and gender of the deceased, it is possible to generate a very large amount of data about the chronological, social and spatial incidence of each of these ‘causes’ of death. It has been possible to uncover the localised pattern of whooping-cough deaths in the parish for the years 1790-93. The disease concentrated in particular locales in the parish in any one year, including a small outbreak in the workhouse nursery during the mini-epidemic of 1790 (Figure 1). Future work will enable the investigators to investigate concentrations of diseases in particular families, and to link data on social status and age-specificity on to their spatial incidence.

There will be two major outreach elements of this sub-theme

• A major conference is being planned by Professor Roberts, jointly with Professor Jane Buikstra of Arizona State University, on ‘Incarceration, Stigma, and Infectious Diseases: Bringing the Past to the Present.’ This will be followed by a series of one-day public symposia and a scholarly collection of papers to be edited by Roberts & Buikstra.
• Professor Boulton’s project, in collaboration with the Museum of London, will mount an interactive gallery from 2009, which will put on display a number of life histories (from birth to death). An interactive ‘guided tour’ of various causes of mortality in the parish of St. Martin in the Fields for particular periods – e.g. where did people die from a particular disease? There will also be a public exhibition (laminates of some life and death histories with accompanying clarifications) in the crypt of St Martin’s Church, which already houses a busy café. This will be illustrated with pictures of the London poor (e.g. by Laroon).

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows a simple map of the built-up area of St Martin’s, with the spatial incidence of whooping cough 1790-93 mapped crudely on (red dots for 1790, blue 1791, green 1792, purple 1793).