And When There Was No Crawdad to Be Found

The annals of the poor may be short and simple, but they need not remain so. The methodologies of social history, pioneered by the French Annalistes in the mid-twentieth century, have uncovered considerable details about the lives of rural peasants, urban workers, and other people who left few formal written records. Other professional disciplines can also add to our knowledge of the marginalized. Archaeologists and genetic specialists in Milan, for example, have spent the last decade and a half studying a unique historical archive: a crypt beneath the city’s old hospital for the poor, the Ca’Grande.

From 1637 to 1697, the hospital staff deposited the corpses of those who had died in their care - tens of thousands of people - in brick vaults beneath a nearby church. The depositors hoped the human remains would decay quickly. They hoped in vain. The city sewer lines ran near the vaults, creating a cold, humid atmosphere that inhibited decomposition. The bodies liquified, saponified, or putrified, creating a smell so intense that the hospital managers finally sealed the vaults.

 

Horsetail grass. Any port in a storm.

A few centuries later, modern forensic researchers realized that the Ca’Grande patients’ remains could reveal a great deal about their personal lives, particularly their dietary and medical histories. Since 2010 they have exhumed and analyzed about one-tenth of the bones and teeth in the vaults. The patients’ skeletons reveal that many of them were afflicted with tuberculosis and syphilis. Their dental plaque, meanwhile, reveals widespread malnourishment. Most ate a diet comprised entirely of grain; some ate horsetail grass, a northern-Italian famine food. Some were apparently willing to eat potatoes, a new import from South America that many other Europeans avoided. That many potato-eaters wound up dying (of other causes) in hospital would not have recommended the crop to their neighbors.

Particular surprises came from analysis of brain tissue clinging to some of the skulls. Some of the tissue contained a variety of opioids, end products of the opium that some patients took for pain relief. In a few cases the researchers found telltale evidence of consumption of another South American import: coca leaf. Scholars had no previous evidence of coca or cocaine consumption in Europe prior to the late nineteenth century, so this was quite a find. If this mild stimulant was in use in Milan, moreover, other workmen probably consumed it in other southern European cities. Writers of historical fiction who want to create a seventeenth-century analogue of Sherlock Holmes take note: if you place your fictional detective in the right city, you don’t have to deprive him of his favorite seven percent solution.