Abstract
We prepared a film documentary about the typhoid epidemics of the last thousand years. We used the ossuaries of Bohemia and Moravia as a source of information, because they are a treasure for paleopathology.
There are bone remains from different periods and we can take samples. We send them to the Radiocarbon Centre in Poznan, which determines the exact period of the typhus epidemic.
Typhoid fever occurred mainly during wars and wet years, so that typhoid epidemics arose, which were often associated with famine. The disease, from the paleopathological point of view, was very beautifully described by Thucydides, the Greek historian, who described it in the time of Pericles, 430-426 BCE.
His description is so accurate that it can only point to typhus and, at the same time, it has also been confirmed by genomic analysis that it was indeed typhus. Shakespeare gave a beautiful description of what a typhoid patient looked like in Henry V when he described Falstaff dying.
It is one of the most beautiful descriptions of the disease, directly from the artist’s point of view. Here we must emphasize that the description is of typhoid fever, typhus abdominalis, which is caused by a small flagellated bacterium, Salmonella typhi.
We can say that the deposits in ossuaries also capture epidemics of typhoid fever occurring on a smaller scale, for example in Žehuň where it is dated to the Hussite period of the 15th century, and in Dlouhá Ves where it dates to the 18th century. Typhoid fever epidemics on a large scale were caused by a compromised immunity of the whole population, which occurred in connection with famines, the largest of which was probably in the early 14th century, in the Little Ice Age, according to the chronicles from 1315–1318 and in 1328.
This period corresponds to the dating in the ossuaries in Nížkov, Malín, and Sedlec, Kutná Hora, pointing to the beginning of the 14th century. It is clear that in the past, due to non-adherence to hygiene rules, lowered immunity, and climatic phenomena, more than 10% of untreated cases could die even in small epidemics.