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Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Elizabeth Furdell of the University of North Florida discusses how she uses the historical record to diagnose ailments in individuals from the distant past.
Elizabeth Furdell is Professor of History Emerita and University Distinguished Professor at the University of North Florida. She has published numerous books on medicine and disease in early modern England, including The Royal Doctors and Fatal Thirst: Diabetes in England until Insulin. She holds a Ph.D. from Kent State University.
Dr. Elizabeth Furdell - Diagnosing Historical Figures,
Imagine having a patient who's been dead for hundreds of years and for whom no dependable medical records exist. That problem confronts historians on a regular basis. How can today's scholars present an accurate picture of an era without knowing for certain what illnesses beset those who lived in the past, be they powerful rulers or their ordinary subjects?
Most investigators cannot have access to the bodies of the long dead, no tests can be conducted, and early medical commentaries often mislead through superstition and error. Tomb effigies may be useful in diagnosing the wealthy, but not for the thousands killed in an epidemic like "the sweat," an illness that destroyed thousands between 1487-1578, then vanished from the record. Was it an arbovirus perhaps borne by mosquitoes or a hantavirus from rodents?
Consider two royal examples from English history. Queen Anne, pregnant eighteen times, failed to produce a Stuart heir. Her physicians did not report on her obstetrical woes, that area of health care then left to midwives, but they did note other symptoms that suggest hereditary syphilis, a disease that mimics other ailments. George III's doctors, however, did keep meticulous accounts of his porphyria, a genetic disorder that left him mad and contributed to Britain's colonial miscues.
Without a body, without reliable records or even patient memoirs, medical historians must rely on what evidence is available to them to diagnose particular sick people and larger populations before the modern era.