Digitised Diseases: seeing beyond the specimen, understanding disease and disability in the past

Summary

Digitised Diseases is a major web-based 3D resource of chronic disease conditions that manifest change to the human skeleton. The resource was established through funds from Jisc, the University of Bradford and Bradford Visualisation. The multi-disciplinary team involving project partners MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and the Royal College of Surgeons of England undertook a programme of mass digitisation of pathological type specimens from world-renowned archaeological, historic and medical collections at the University of Bradford, in London and York. We continue to augment this resource through ingestion of new content.

The resource was always envisaged as needing to appeal to a diverse user community, having impact not just among academic and clinical beneficiaries, but also enriching the wider understanding of public health in the past. From the outset, our focus was on making sure that the digitised palaeopathological exemplars were represented and understood within a broader clinical context. In essence we wanted to emphasise the impact of living with disease and disability in an era before modern therapies were available and the significance of care provision that would have been required at a societal level, given the longevity of many of these conditions.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Building a Bioarchaeology of Care

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