Maia Casna, PhD

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Studying respiratory health
in the past

The impact that the physical environment has on our health is directly observable in the quality of the air we breathe. In the past few years, there has been growing concern about the possible effects of air pollution on the respiratory health of people living in newly industrialized centres: in 2016, respiratory disorders affected 12% of the Dutch population and caused the death of more than 5000 people. We need clean air to breathe but, throughout history, achieving the balance between human endeavor and health has proved to be a challenge. 

In the Netherlands, the urbanization of centres started around the 13th century and caused several medical concerns on the respiratory health of Dutch citizens. The intensification of industrial production and urban development brought severe impacts on Dutch air quality, whose consequences are still observable today on human skeletal remains in the form of small lesions within the nasal cavity and on the ribs.
With this study, a more complete understanding of the impact of urbanization and social changes over people’s respiratory health in the Netherlands will be developed, together with a new, more attentive historical narrative of the Lowlands social past. Having an insight of how people responded to exposure to bad air quality in the past will help scholars to better comprehend respiratory conditions and to define future health policies, limiting a problem that is of increasing concern in today’s world.

AIMS AND APPROACHES

Understanding the health implications
of urbanization

The main aim of this project is to understand whether urbanization had an impact on the respiratory health of past Dutch citizens. To do so, six skeletal populations dating from the medieval and post-medieval periods were selected. 

On human remains, bony changes in specific locations are considered as the result of the inflammation of the respiratory tract, a consequence of several disorders such as pharyngitis, sinusitis, and chronic lung infection. Maxillary sinuses and internal surfaces of the ribs will be observed to detect lesions associated with respiratory conditions. In order to better approach the main aim of this study, four different factors that could have played a role in the spread of respiratory disease and that are notoriously involved with the urbanization process in the Netherlands were identified:

1. SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS
   Factors such as working conditions, food availability, and cultural practices likely had an important role in shaping the health of Dutch citizens, as living in the city led people to experience very different lives, albeit similar health challenges. We therefore investigate whether different socioeconomic classes impacted people’s risk to develop respiratory infections.
   
2. TIME PERIOD
   Urbanization developed through time and space and impacted both cities and the surrounding countryside in different and everchanging ways. We investigate whether changing relationships between towns and countryside resulted in a variation in respiratory disease occurrence patterns through time in the medieval and post-medieval Netherlands.
   
3. TOBACCO CONSUMPTION
   Today, smoking is perhaps considered the major cause for respiratory diseases. In Europe, tobacco was not available throughout the medieval period, but came into fashion in the Lowlands among all social classes around the 17th century. Therefore, we expect to observe a strong correlation between the presence on bones of tobacco-use markers and a high prevalence of respiratory infections.
   
4. CHILDHOOD
   Until recent times, children have been largely invisible in historical records, as their perspectives have always been filtered through the eyes of adults. However, today clinical scholars agree that children tend to be more vulnerable to respiratory diseases than adults for various social and physiological reasons. This project will investigate whether this was the case in the past as well.

Implications and relevance

In the past decade, archaeological human remains have proven to be an excellent source of evidence for studying past people’s lifeways. As the number of archaeological human remains available for research is usually large, scholars have been able to study communities as whole, highlighting how in most cases the social environment had a consistent impact on health and vice versa. This study not only adds to current bioarchaeological knowledge on respiratory health but uses a palaeopathological approach in combination of historical data to obtain a better understanding of people’s physical response to the unique urban development patterns that occurred in the Netherlands. By taking the first step towards a new narrative of urbanization, this multidisciplinary and diachronic approach will open a useful window on the health and welfare in the past Northern Low Countries.