Psoriatic arthropathy in a 17th century archaeological protestant population belonging to Saint-Maurice cemetery in France

Abstract

The protestant cemetery of Saint-Maurice as well as what remains of the Charenton Temple (1607-1686) are among the most recently excavated sites of the Val de Marne. The salvage excavation directed by J. Y. Dufour of Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (INRAP) in 2005, where a medical facility was built, was instrumental in flagging not only an important 17th century protestant cemetery, but also in locating the foundations of the first temple built in 1607, that was the most important reformed church of the French realm. The cemetery is all the more special from an anthropological point of view since its funeral population comes from the Huguenot community of Paris, probably over a period of 80 years from 1606 to 1685 (Dufour & Buquet, 2006). The identification (Dufour, 2001) and the excavation that concerned the western part of the cemetery allowed for the identification of 163 individual burials, one double burial, and seven ossuaries. The funerary, anthropological and pale pathological contexts feature funerary practices related to the protestant cult and a sanitary state that have been rarely studied in a modern era in Northern France. Besides a plague epidemic that appeared as soon as 1636 or even before in the area of the Marne mander, and more precisely in Saint-Maurice, psoriatic arthropathy (or psoriatic arthritis) lesions were diagnosed on the skeletons of an important population that had never been described before. The lesion symptoms of this polyarthritis found on the mobile joints, especially on the interphalangeal articulations are rarely observed because of the preservation of the skeletons.

Key words : psoriatic arthropathy, pathology, modern population, 17th century, Charenton temple, France

doi: 10.4314/ijma.v1i4.2