A brucelose em paleopatologia: um estudo de caso proveniente da necrópole Crist...

• Author(s): Curate, Francisco
• Date: 2004
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10316/20592
• Origin: Estudo Geral - Universidade de Coimbra
• Subject(s): Brucelose; Esqueleto Humano; Paleopatologia; História da Medicina; Cacela Velha
• Document Type: Article
• Language: Portuguese

Description

The theoretical and practical ethos of the paleopathological perspective can reveal important aspects of the diachronic evolution of chronic pathological processes that affect the skeleton. With this perspective in mind, we present here a composite picture of brucellosis (Malta’s fever) based on data from biological anthropology, history of medicine, archaeology and clinical medicine. The chief purposes of this article include the construction of a synthesis that incorporates the clinical definition, the aetiology and the symptoms of brucellosis, examples of the disease in the paleopathological literature, and discussion of a possible case from a Christian necropolis (13th-16th centuries) located in Cacela Velha (Algarve, Portugal).