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Difficult human childbirth is often explained to be the outcome of long term evolutionary hanges in the genus Homo resulting in an‘obstetrical dilemma,’defined as the compromise between the need for a large pelvis in birthing large brained babies and a narrow pelvis for the mechanics of bipedal locomotion (Washburn, 1960). The ‘obstetrical dilemma’ is argued to result in the risk of cephalopelvic disproportion and injury (Washburn, 1960). Current research challenges the premise of the obstetrical dilemma by considering the effects ecological factors have on the growth of the bony human pelvis (Wells et al., 2012; Wells, 2015, Stone, 2016; Wells, 2017). This thesis tests Wells et al.’s (2012) assertion that environmental factors, such as agricultural diets, compromise pelvic size and morphology and potentially affect human childbirth. The skeletal samples examined in this study are from medieval English populations with long established agricultural diets. Bony pelvic metrics analyzed are from the St. Mary Spital assemblage, and demographic and pathological data from St. Mary Spital were compared to the East Smithfield Black Death cemetery assemblage. The results show that there is some evidence for a relationship between chronic stress and compromised pelvic shape and size in both men and women, however the evidence is not conclusive that younger women with compromised pelvic dimensions were at an increased risk of obstructed labour and maternal mortality during childbirth. This suggests that childbirth was not likely a significantly elevated cause of death among younger women in medieval London as a result of cephalopelvic disproportion. The concept of a single obstetrical dilemma is flawed, as multiple obstetrical dilemmas other than cephalopelvic disproportion through pelvic capacity constrains are present, including ecological and nutritional stressors, childbirth practices and technologies, sanitation ractices, and social and gender inequality / Graduate

abstract: This dissertation analyzes the fourteenth-century English and nineteenth-century Hopi experiences with the unwelcomed traveler of disease, specifically the Black Death and the smallpox outbreak of 1898-1899. By placing both peoples and events beside one another, it becomes possible to move past the death toll inflected by disease and see the role of diseases as a catalyst of historical change. Furthermore, this study places the Hopi experience with smallpox, and disease in general, in context with the human story of disease. The central methodical approach is ethnohistory, using firsthand accounts to reconstruct the cultural frameworks of the Hopi and the English. In analyzing the English and Hopi experiences this study uses the Medicine Way approach of three dimensions. Placing the first dimension approach (the English and the bubonic plague) alongside the third dimension approach (the Hopi and smallpox) demonstrates, not only the common ground of both approaches (second dimension), but the commonalities in the interactions of humans and disease. As my dissertation demonstrates, culture provides the framework, a system for living, for how individuals will interpret and react to events and experiences. This framework provides a means, a measure, to identify and strive for normalcy. There is a universal human drive to restore normalcy after one's world turns upside down, and in seeking to restore what was lost, society undergoes transformation. Disease creates opportunity for change and for balance to be restored. This study concludes disease is a catalyst of change because of how humans respond to it. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2014

Centuries of devastating, recurrent outbreaks made the plague the archetypical disease of late medieval and early modern societies. Yet explanations of where it came from changed significantly over time. This dissertation examines how portrayals of the plague’s origins and place in society evolved separately in England and France, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It relies in particular on plague tracts, a long-lasting literary genre that offered standardized therapeutic and curative advice. Medical historians have studied these sources to trace the development of medical thinking and practice over time. This dissertation focuses instead on the tracts’ changing discourses about the nature of the plague that are unique to time and to place. The study elaborates a new analytical method to investigate the materiality and contents of these historical documents: it involves close reading and a codicological/bibliographical comparison of approximately 180 tracts in manuscript and printed form, set into their appropriate historical contexts. Tract producers influenced how the plague was understood locally. England’s centralised print industry fostered the idea that London was the de facto site and source of the disease; France’s diffused industry, by contrast, encouraged the discussion and tracking of outbreaks in multiple cities. Understanding of the plague’s origins also evolved: belief in malevolent celestial events gave way, in turn, to blaming unhealthy local landscapes, then the living conditions of the poor, and finally the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-seventeenth century, tract writers pointed to the Ottoman Empire as the historical and geographical source of the disease. Especially during the tumultuous sixteenth century, religious discord, dynastic factionalism, and incapable rulers also appeared in the tracts as causes and effects of the plague. Plague tracts are direct expressions and reflections of the short- and medium-term historical waves in which they appeared. It is possible to trace through them shifts in political, cultural, and intellectual worldviews. The spread of humanism in particular influenced how tract writers discussed the plague’s origins and influence in society. This study thus demonstrates that understanding disease is a cultural construct specific to time and place. Observing the unique aspects of plague tracts enhances our ability to understand the place of disease in past human societies.

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This essay discusses the width of the late medieval desertion of farms in Sweden from an archaeological perspective. The object of the essay is to investigate if archaeological investigations and research during the last 10-15 years have changed the view of the late medieval desertion in relation to the Scandinavian research project on deserted farms and villages. The essay also deals with questions on causes to the desertion and when desertion occurred. An ambition of the essay is also to give a general picture of archaeological investigations during the last 10-15 years considering the late medieval desertion. The analyses-material consists mainly of reports from archaeological investigations. Most of the investigations analysed in this essay are investigations of single farms. Because of this it is natural these investigations do not say much about the width of the desertion. As long as an archaeological investigation is not a part of a large project, where the purpose is to show the width of the desertion, one cannot expect that one single investigation will give much information or knowledge about the width. However, if the ambition is to obtain a complete picture of a medieval deserted farm or village, this essay confirms that an archaeological investigation is necessary, willingly in an interdisciplinary cooperation.

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<p>This dissertation discusses molecular analyses of dental and skeletal material from victims of the Black Death with the goal of both identifying and describing the evolutionary history of the causative agent of the pandemic. Through this work, <em>Yersinia pestis</em> DNA was successfully identified in skeletal material from a well-documented Black Death burial ground, the East Smithfield cemetery of London, England (1348 -1350). The thesis presents two major methodological advancements in the field of ancient pathogen research: 1) it describes a protocol to confirm the authenticity of ancient pathogen DNA, thus circumventing tenuous issues relating to modern contaminants, and 2) it demonstrates the applicability of DNA capture methods to isolate ancient pathogen DNA from its complex metagenomic background common to ancient DNA extracts. The dissertation is comprised of three publications. The first, submitted to the journal BMC Systems Biology, describes a computational software program for oligo design that has applications to PCR, and capture techniques such as primer extension capture (PEC) and array-based capture. The second manuscript, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a novel capture technique for retrieval of the <em>pestis</em>-specific pPCP (9.6kb) plasmid which can be used as a simple screening tool for the presence of <em>Y. pestis</em> DNA in ancient remains, and describes a method for authenticating ancient pathogen DNA. The third paper, published in the journal Nature, presents a draft genome of <em>Yersinia pestis </em>isolated from the individuals of the East Smithfield collection, thus presenting the first ancient pathogen genome in published literature. Evolutionary changes as they relate to phylogenetic placement and the evolution of virulence are discussed within an anthropological framework.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study explores the multiple ways in which Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) functioned through concrete biomedical institutions, namely, the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the World Health Organization (WHO). AIDS is viewed as a product of the full range of institutional practices in which it became embedded and in which it was set within the boundaries of Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease (see the Preface section). This biomedical model of disease was materialized through journalistic practices and sold as news. Within these operative terms can be understood another analytical strategy that also designates the main domain of my study of this contemporary social form: I argue in this thesis that knowledge about AIDS was by no means dependent solely on the objective, scientifically determined, "received narrative" of biomedicine; what is today known as AIDS is also a product of a wide range of social practices produced and reproduced over time and space. AIDS is also an outcome of the resolutions, judgements and decisions that working journalists made over time in terms of what they generated or covered as news; the disease is also product of a large assortment of representational mirrors that I call `authentic voices', to take as good examples, the "narrative of moral protest", the narrative of a "homosexual disease", the narrative of a "heterosexual disease," and the narrative of a "modern-day Black Death" (plague). The story of AIDS in the media can also be seen to be defined by the proliferation of these authentic voices. From this reading, the distinctive trait of AIDS in the media lies in the fact that it is a constructed object, a disease framed through a specific structure of meanings. When we look at these structure of meanings we find that their moral and cultural assumptions and stereotypical connotations embody certain aspects of the organism of the society within which they were created and nourished over a much longer history. / Sociology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Sociology)