archaeology
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We all know the amazing reconstruction of the head of Richard III, and the confirmation it gave of how he really had looked. Forget Shakespeare’s Richard III, the real man had been young, good-looking and altogether normal, except for scoliosis that affected his spine. But when he was dressed, it wouldn’t have shown, especially in…
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Ancient human remains can sometimes ‘speak’ to us through time and inform us not only of their own life stories, but how modern medical complaints came to be. Here is a case of a Franciscan friar’s mummified remains found in an old church in Ecuador that collapsed during an earthquake in 1949. The man, who…
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Scoliosis treatments at the time of Richard III
“Tudor” propaganda, Battle of Bosworth, Eugenie of York, genetics, hormones, idiopathic scoliosism, Ipswich, James Blake, Kurt Cobain, Leicester Greyfriars, Liz Taylor, Liza Minelli, massage, Richard III, Richard III Society, Robert Lovell, scoliosis, Shakespeare, surgery, traction, Turkish baths, Usain BoltAfter centuries of slanders about Richard III, always named as “the hunchbacked king”, it was finally proved that he just suffered from scoliosis. He was not born with this condition but he probably started to suffer with it in his adolescence between 10 and 15. This is the so-called idiopathic scoliosis that can be, in…
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The quoted passage below is from this source . “….What will happen to your bones after you die? Will they be venerated as relics? Buried with care by your loved ones? Preserved as part of a museum’s collection? Each of these treatments says something different about the value – religious, cultural, or scientific –…
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We all know that medieval London was surrounded by great city walls, a lot of which dated from Roman times, and that there was a wide ditch outside the wall, to add to the capital’s defences. It gradually became silted up, and although it was dredged and cleared several times, it was encroached upon by…
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Yes, 17th century, in spite of this headline elsewhere, it is this to which I am drawing your attention. The headline says the ring is 15th-century, which I suppose it might be, if it was 200 years old when it was lost, but examination seems to confirm that it is 250 years old, and therefore of…
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“….English Civil War musket balls, Roman pottery and items from the 2nd Century AD are among objects unearthed during a rare dig at a Yorkshire landmark. [Scarborough Castle] “….Teams discovered the find during a six-week operation on land at Scarborough Castle, which was twice besieged in the 17th Century civil war. “….The last major excavations…
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Last night I watched (on PBS America) a BBC2 Timewatch episode entitled The Mysteries of the Medieval Ship. It concerned the discovery, in June 2002, of a foundered/scuttled medieval vessel of some size, buried in the oozing mud of the Severn Sea – well, the oozing mud of the River Usk, at Newport, to be…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 