Osteoarthritis is one of the most common general diseases in modern society Sweden. It is also one of the most common diseases traced within archaeological human remains. The aetiology of osteoarthritis has been widely debated within the field of medicine and paleopathology. The initial claim that the degenerative disease is caused by activity and ageing has been questioned and factors such as environment, diet and genetic markers has been brought up and to some extent studied. Even though osteoarthritis being one of the most common diseases recognized among archaeological human remains, it has during recent years often been neglected within the field and referred to mostly in different palaeopathological atlases. By studying human remains from the medieval churchyard of St: Hans in Visby, Gotland, the notion of osteoarthritis as a general disease in the past is discussed in the following study. The concept of a medieval “general public” is examined by looking at social strata through grave placement on the studied graveyard.

Despite a wealth of literature on the aetiology of somatic distress or somatization, somatic theory has failed to expand beyond a dualistic epistemology of causation. Within the primary health context where medically unexplained symptoms are characteristically articulated as literal, symbolic gestures of internal psychological processes, individuals' subjective accounts of somatic distress are reduced to objective phenomena and thus articulated on the grounds of absence. Within this context, the body as a lived, meaningful, perceiving subjectivity is silenced in favour of the corpse, thus rendering the somatizing individual's lived and subjective experience, expression and knowledge of somatic distress inaccessible. Instead, the somatizing individual is positioned within a domain of perturbed silence - a domain in which the professional's turning away or retreat from engaging somatization on the grounds of unique, subjective and corporeal experience, positions the patient/client as a passive, silent recipient whose somatic expressions as lived are overlooked. This study attempts to initiate a theoretical focus of departure from existing articulations of somatic distress through the development of a theoretical and epistemological framework that addresses some of the tensions inherent to contemporary somatic theory. In so doing, it employs embodiment philosophy and narrative methodology as a basis for a preliminary and critical investigation into a relatively neglected area of somatization research. / KMBT_363 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in