This is the first book to be published on any aspect of medicine in the crusades. It will be of interest not only to scholars of the crusades specifically, but also to scholars of medieval Europe, the Byzantine world and the Islamic world. Focusing on injuries and their surgical treatment, Piers D. Mitchell considers medical practitioners, hospitals on battlefields and in towns, torture and mutilation, emergency and planned surgical procedures, bloodletting, analgesia and anesthesia. He provides an assessment of the exchange of medical knowledge that took place between East and West in the crusades, and of the medical negligence legislation for which the kingdom of Jerusalem was famous. The book presents a radical reassessment of many outdated misconceptions concerning medicine in the crusades and the Frankish states of the Latin East.

Parasites have been infecting humans throughout our evolution. When complex societies developed, the greater population density provided new opportunities for parasites to spread. In this interdisciplinary volume, the author brings his expertise in medicine, archaeology and history to explore the contribution of parasites in causing flourishing past civilizations to falter and decline. By using cutting edge methods, Mitchell presents the evidence for parasites that infected the peoples of key ancient civilizations across the world in order to understand their impact upon those populations. This new understanding of the archaeological and historical evidence for intestinal worms, ectoparasites, and protozoa shows how different cultures were burdened by contrasting types of diseases depending upon their geographical location, endemic insects, food preferences and cultural beliefs.

This is the first book to be published on any aspect of medicine in the crusades. It will be of interest not only to scholars of the crusades specifically, but also to scholars of medieval Europe, the Byzantine world and the Islamic world. Focusing on injuries and their surgical treatment, Piers D. Mitchell considers medical practitioners, hospitals on battlefields and in towns, torture and mutilation, emergency and planned surgical procedures, bloodletting, analgesia and anesthesia. He provides an assessment of the exchange of medical knowledge that took place between East and West in the crusades, and of the medical negligence legislation for which the kingdom of Jerusalem was famous. The book presents a radical reassessment of many outdated misconceptions concerning medicine in the crusades and the Frankish states of the Latin East.

Papers presented at the Twelfth Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology held in Cambridge, September 2010. Contents: Introduction (Mitchell and Buckberry); 1) Human Evolution after the Origin of our Species: Bridging the gap between Palaeoanthropology and Bioarchaeology (Stock); 2) Sexual Dimorphism in Adult Skeletal Remains at Ban Non Wat, Thailand, during the Intensification of Agriculture in Early Prehistoric Southeast Asia (Clark, Tayles and Halcrow); 3) The Bioarchaeology of Agriculture in the Southern Levant: A Comparative Study of Epipaleolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Bronze Age Agriculturalists (Gasperetti); 4) Where Have we Been, Where Are we Now, and What Does the Future Hold? Palaeopathology in the UK over the Last 30 Years, with a Few Bees in my Bonnet (Roberts); 5) The Paleoparasitology of 17th-18th Century Spitalfields in London (Anastasiou, Mitchell and Jeffries); 6) Integrated Strategies for the use of Lipid Biomarkers in the Diagnosis of Ancient Mycobacterial Disease (Lee, Bull, Molnar, Marcsick, Palfi, Donoghue, Besra and Minnikin); 7) A Comparative Study of Markers of Occupational Stress in Coastal Fishers and Inland Agriculturalists from Northern Chile (Ponce); 8) The Human Remains from the Medieval Islamic Cemetery of Can Fonoll, Ibiza, Spain: Preliminary Results (Kyriakou, Marquez-Grant, Langstaff, Samuels, Pacelli, Castro, Roig and Kranioti); 9) A New Known Age and Sex Collection at the Natural History Museum, London (Delbarre, Clegg, Kruszynski and Bonney); 10) Implementation of Preliminary Digital Radiographic Examination in the Confines of the Crypt of St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London (Bekvalac); 11) A Revised Method for Assessing Tooth Wear in the Deciduous Dentition (Clement and Freyne); 12) A Study of Interobserver Variation in Cranial Measurements and the Resulting Consequences when Analysed using CranID (Slater and Smith); 13) Early Bronze Age Busta in Cambridgeshire? On-Site Experiments to Investigate the Effects of Fires and Pyres on Pits (Dodwell); 14) Archaeological Insights into the Disarticulation Pattern of a Human Body in a Sitting/Squatting Position (Gerdau Radonic); 15) Mortuary Practices at Aztalan: A Reappraisal of an Elite Burial at a Middle Mississippian Site in the Western Great Lakes Region of the Midwestern United States (Sullivan and Rodell); 16) Stature of Burials Interred with Weapons in Early Medieval England (Mays); The Uses of Field Anthropology on the Excavation of the St-Rumbold Cemetery, Mechelen, Belgium (Van de Vijver ).

Sanitation and intestinal health is something we often take for granted today. However, people living in many regions of the developing world still suffer with debilitating diseases due to the lack of sanitation. Despite its clear impact upon health in modern times, sanitation in past populations is a topic that has received surprisingly little attention. This book brings together key experts from around the world to explore fascinating aspects of life in the past relevant to sanitation, and how that affected our ancestors. By its end readers will realize that toilets were in use in ancient Mesopotamia even before the invention of writing, and that flushing toilets with anatomic seats were a technology of ancient Greece at the time of the minotaur myth. They will see how sanitation compared in ancient Rome and medieval London, and will take a virtual walk around the sanitation of York at the time of the Vikings. Readers will also understand which intestinal parasites infected humans in different regions of the world over different time periods, what these parasites tell us about early human evolution, later population migrations, past diet, lifestyle, and the effects of sanitation technology. There is good evidence that over the millennia people in the past realized that sanitation mattered. They invented toilets, cleaner water supplies, drains, waste disposal and sanitation legislation. While past views on sanitation were very different to those of today, it is clear than many past societies took sanitation much more seriously than was previously thought.