Theses and Dissertations

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9578-6904

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Zuckerman, Molly K.

Committee Member

Ubelaker, Douglas H.

Committee Member

Osterholtz, Anna J.

Date of Degree

8-9-2022

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Applied Anthropology

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures

Abstract

This work identifies and describes pathological skeletal changes associated with and attributable to acquired syphilis and which potentially caused functional impairment within eleven skeletal individuals recovered from five industrial-era London cemeteries. In eight (72.73%), functional impairment was likely or very likely, based on type and distribution of lesions across their skeleton. These impairments likely impacted the individuals’ ability to engage in various forms of physical activity, potentially limiting their economic potential. These results expand our still highly limited understanding of syphilis’s functional impacts within past populations, especially within industrial-era societies, querying longstanding characterizations of tertiary gummatous involvement as benign, while encouraging paleopathological investigations of the functional impacts of syphilis in past populations in which the disease was endemic, such as industrial-era England. Further, with syphilis rates on the rise globally, this information may be informative prognostically for present-day clinical cases of primary to tertiary stage undiagnosed and/or untreated syphilis.

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