CFP: Contagions sessions at the International Congress for Medieval Studies 2018

by Michelle Ziegler Contagions: The Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies has been given the opportunity of organizing three sessions at next year's International Congress for Medieval Studies. This is the equivalent of a full day at the Congress. The Congress will be held from May 10 to May 13, 2018, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo...

Environment, Society and the Black Death in Sweden

Environment, Society and the Black Death: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Late Medieval Crisis in Sweden. Edited by Per Lagerås. Oxbow Books, 2016.  The Black Death is a bit of a phantom in this book. Like the human body casts of Pompeii, the Black Death is perceptible  by the void it left behind -- a void...

A winter’s worth of work

Its well into spring now and my blogging has perhaps hit an all time low. I have been working on a project that I will write about more later this year. I've been reading a lot about environmental history, not the usual material for this blog. Some of it is listed below. It's a sample...

CFP: Plague in diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective, EAA at Vilnius 2016

Call for Papers: Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, Vilnius Aug. 31-Sept.1, 2016 Plague in diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective Plague, an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, occurred in at least three major historical pandemics: the Justinianic Plague (6th to 8th century), the Black Death (from 14th century onwards), and the modern or...

A Migration Age Anglo-Saxon Leper

Paleomicrobiology and isotopic analysis has the ability to completely change what we know of past infectious diseases. A study published this month on a fifth century Anglo-Saxon skeleton is one of the most complete I have read. Lesions on skeletons found at Great Chesterfield in Essex, England, suggested possible leprosy. To confirm this diagnosis, they...

Contours of the Black Death Cemetery at Charterhouse Square, London

Excavations for the Crossrail Extension project discovered the second major Black Death cemetery in London in 2013. This week the first peer-reviewed publication of findings from the site appeared (in press).  As a rescue excavation in the midst of a construction project, the site had to be quickly surveyed for the extent of the cemetery and this...

Molecular Confirmation of Yersinia pestis in 6th century Bavaria

Erasing any lingering doubts about the agent of the Plague of Justinian, a group of German biological anthropologists have shown conclusively that Yersinia pestis caused an epidemic in a 6th century Bavarian cemetery at Aschheim. Harbeck et al (2013) provide a convincing refutation of previous theories about the etiologic agent of the Plague of Justinian....

Metagenomics, Lyme Disease, and the Tyrolean Iceman’s Tattoos

When the genetic analysis of the 5,300 year old Tyrolean Iceman, better known as Ötzi, was published in February, most of the attention was naturally focused on his genomic DNA. His genomic DNA produced some interesting results: he had brown eyes, blood type O+, was probably lactose intolerant and from a southern European gene pool....

Retrospective Diagnosis in the 21st Century

The way we make and think about retrospective diagnosis is changing. Over the last decade, laboratory results have become the preferred (maybe even mandatory) method of making a retrospective diagnosis [1]. To extrapolate a few positive laboratory results to cover an entire epidemic, it must correlate with reported signs and symptoms and ideally epidemiology. There...