Medieval Nightmare of Scurvy

A Medieval teenage girl found buried face-down last year in northern Italy suffered from scurvy and was rejected by her community, according to new study of her burial.

The site, a burial ground on which a martyr church dedicated to San Calocero was built around the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., was completely abandoned in 1593.

"The girl lay in prone position in a tomb much deeper than the others. She was buried in an isolated area of the cemetery in front of the church," said archaeologist Stefano Roascio, the excavation director.

Like other deviant burials, in which the dead were buried with a brick in the mouth, nailed or staked to the ground, or even decapitated and dismembered, the prone burials aimed to humiliate the dead and impede the individual from rising from the grave.

Found with her hands placed on the pelvis and straight and parallel legs, the girl’s bones showed all signs of a severe anaemia. Further analysis also determined she suffered from scurvy, a disorder caused by an insufficient intake of vitamin C.

The disease was most common among sailors in the 16th to 18th centuries who embarked on long voyages without enough foods with vitamin C and frequently died from the condition.

Found mostly in the bones of the cranial vault, porotic hyperostosis causes them to become spongy and the bone tissue porous. Examining the remains of the teenage girl, Dellù and colleagues found evident signs of the pathological condition on the external surface of the occipital bone, on the orbital roofs and on the greater wings of the sphenoid.

In the anthropologic literature, porotic hyperostosis is mostly seen as evidence of iron deficiency anemia, but in this case specific clues indicate the girl was a scurvy victim.

The young girl somehow scared the community.

Her pallor, associated to other scurvy symptoms such as mouth, leg and eye bleeding, corkscrew hair, protruding eyes, frog leg posture and possibly fainting and epileptic seizures, must have played a key role in her social rejection.

As she died, she was humiliated with the face down treatment, so that her soul, considered impure, would not come out to threaten the living.