The Beauty and Heartbreak of Bones

 So my parents just surprised me this morning with a copy of "Identification Of Pathological Conditions In Human Skeletal Remains". I'd first seen this book a year or so ago when one of my professors at Clark, Dr. John Lundy, loaned me his copy for a few days, and ever since I've been lusting for it, but the price tag of roughly $150 kept it out of reach. Bless my parents.

This book is a surprisingly engaging collection of photos and analysis of the various diseases, injuries, infections, and congenital and nutritional disorders that can affect the human skeleton, often it quite horrifying ways. I don't yet know what the legal implications might be of scanning and posting pictures from the book, so I will hold off until I find out. It describes and illustrates the potential skeletal effects of everything from syphilis to tuberculosis, cancer to malnutrition, fractures to trepanation. The specimens seem to be mainly from a period between around 1500 A.D. to the late 19th century, though there are some that are much older.

I have to admit that as I sat in the park today, reading away and enjoying the sunshine, I realized that I had forgotten how absolutely heartbreaking this book can be. The detached scientist in me is fascinated by bone, the beauty and elegance of its structures, and how it can heal and adapt when confronted with the most horrible traumas and infections, but the other part of me that is far more empathetic just wanted to cry. I can't even imagine what life could have been like for a teenager whose face was being eaten away by syphillis, or a young woman whose spine was bent at nearly a 90 degree angle due to the destructive effects of tuberculosis, or the middle-aged woman whose scalp was torn off when her hair was caught in a weaving machine and who lingered for 8 months until finally succumbing to overwhelming infection, or the man whose skull was pried apart by an enemy's sword, and yet he clearly lived for many years afterward with this awful gaping inch-wide fissure in his head. All these people whose joints are calcified masshapen masses, whose skulls are pitted and fissured, whose fingers have rotted away. It breaks my heart, and also amazes me, that so many of these people survived for years with conditions that must have caused constant pain, that left them barely able to walk, to eat. I can only assume that they had someone to care for them, but there must have been many who did not, and it's such an awful thought.

Those of us in the comfortable, middle-class modern world can easily forget how blessed we are to have antibiotics, emergency rooms, machines that can see inside our bodies, clean operating rooms and skilled surgeons, but there are also millions of people all over the world who don't have these things, who still die of rampant infections, bacterias, venereal diseases, malnutrition, parasites. I think this is one of the many reasons that I've chosen to study the remains of the dead: to see so much suffering in the living would, I think, be more than I could ever bear.

I'll will try to find out if I can reproduce some of the illustrations here, and if so I'll post them as soon as possible.