Tuberculosis in Early Civilization
In 2008, evidence for tuberculosis infection has been discovered in human remains from the Neolithic era dating from 9,000 years ago, in a settlement in the eastern Mediterranean. This finding was confirmed by morphological and molecular methods; to date it is the oldest evidence of tuberculosis infection in humans.
Evidence of the infection in humans was also found in a cemetery near Heidelberg, in the Neolithic bone remains that show evidence of the type of angulation often seen with spinal tuberculosis. Some authors call tuberculosis the first disease known to mankind.
Signs of the disease have also been found in Egyptian mummies dated between 3000 and 2400 BC.
The most convincing case was found in the mummy of priest Nesperehen, discovered by Grebart in 1881, which featured evidence of spinal tuberculosis with the characteristic psoas abscesses. Similar features were discovered on other mummies like that of the priest Philoc and throughout the cemeteries of Thebes.
It appears likely that Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti both died from tuberculosis, and evidence indicates that hospitals for tuberculosis existed in Egypt as early as 1500 BC.
The Ebers papyrus, an important Egyptian medical treatise from around 1550 BC, describes a pulmonary consumption associated with the cervical lymph nodes. It recommended that it be treated with the surgical lancing of the cyst and the application of a ground mixture of acacia seyal, peas, fruits, animal blood, insect blood, honey and salt.
The Old Testament mentions a consumptive illness that would affect the Jewish people if they stray from God. It is listed in the section of curses given before they enter the land of Palestine.
Read more about this topic: History Of Tuberculosis
Famous quotes containing the words tuberculosis, early and/or civilization:
“With sighs more lunar than bronchial,
Howbeit eluding fallopian diagnosis,
She simpers into the tribal library and reads
That Keats died of tuberculosis . . .”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)