Boldsen Jesper L, Rasmussen Kaare Lund, Riis Thomas, Dittmar Manuela, Weise Svenja
Department of Anthropology (ADBOU), Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of Southern Denmark. Odense, Denmark.
Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark. Odense, Denmark.
Anthropol Anz. 2013;70(3):273-87. doi: 10.1127/0003-5548/2013/0318.
Leprosy was a well-recognized and dreaded disease in medieval Europe. The disease is reported to have reached Germany with the Roman invasion and it was present in Scandinavia in the first centuries AD. This paper estimates and analyzes the frequency of leprosy among adult people buried in one of five medieval cemeteries in the city of Schleswig. Seven different dichotomous osteological lesions indicative of leprosy were analyzed, and it was possible to score at least one of these conditions on 350 adult skeletons (aged 15 or older). The scores were transformed to a statistic indicating the likelihood that the person to whom the skeleton belonged suffered from leprosy. It was found that the frequency of leprosy in the five cemeteries varied between 9 and 44%. Four of the five cemeteries showed frequencies ranging from 35 and 44% and with no statistically significant differences among them. The fifth cemetery showed a significantly lower frequency of leprosy (9%). The distribution of female age at death does not appear to be affected by leprosy status. This means that females experienced a considerably elevated risk of dying once they had contracted leprosy as the disease usually has a mid-adulthood age of onset. In four of the five cemeteries males with leprosy died in higher ages than men without leprosy--in two of the cemeteries the difference was statistically significant. This indicates that leprosy usually added less to the risk of dying among men than among women in medieval Schleswig.
麻风病在中世纪欧洲是一种广为人知且令人恐惧的疾病。据报道，这种疾病随着罗马人的入侵传入德国，公元最初几个世纪在斯堪的纳维亚半岛就已存在。本文对石勒苏益格市五个中世纪墓地之一中埋葬的成年人中的麻风病发病频率进行了估算和分析。分析了七种不同的表明麻风病的二分法骨骼病变，在350具成年骨骼（年龄15岁及以上）上至少可以对其中一种病变进行评分。这些评分被转换为一个统计数据，表明骨骼所属之人患麻风病的可能性。研究发现，五个墓地中麻风病的发病频率在9%至44%之间。五个墓地中有四个的发病频率在35%至44%之间，且它们之间没有统计学上的显著差异。第五个墓地的麻风病发病频率显著较低（9%）。女性死亡年龄的分布似乎不受麻风病状况的影响。这意味着女性一旦感染麻风病，死亡风险会大幅上升，因为这种疾病通常在成年中期发病。在五个墓地中的四个，患麻风病的男性比未患麻风病的男性死亡年龄更大——在其中两个墓地，这种差异具有统计学意义。这表明在中世纪的石勒苏益格，麻风病通常给男性带来的死亡风险比女性要小。
