Leprosy in medieval Denmark: Exploring life histories through a multi‐tissue and multi‐isotopic approach
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objectives By focusing on two Danish leprosaria (Næstved and Odense; 13th–16th c. CE) and using diet and origin as proxies, we follow a multi‐isotopic approach to reconstruct life histories of patients and investigate how leprosy affected both institutionalized individuals and the medieval Danish community as a whole. Materials and Methods We combine archaeology, historical sources, biological anthropology, isotopic analyses (δ 13 C, δ 15 N, δ 34 S, 87 Sr/ 86 Sr) and radiocarbon dating, and further analyze bones with different turnover rates (ribs and long bones). Results The δ 13 C, δ 15 N and δ 34 S results indicate a C 3 terrestrial diet with small contributions of marine protein for leprosy patients and individuals from other medieval Danish sites. A similar diet is seen through time, between males and females, and patients with and without changes on facial bones. The isotopic comparison between ribs and long bones reveals no significant dietary change. The δ 34 S and 87 Sr/ 86 Sr results suggest that patients were local to the regions of the leprosaria . Moreover, the radiocarbon dates show a mere 50% agreement with the arm position dating method used in Denmark. Conclusions A local origin for the leprosy patients is in line with historical evidence, unlike the small dietary contribution of marine protein. Although only 10% of the analyzed individuals have rib/long bone offsets that undoubtedly show a dietary shift, the data appear to reveal a pattern for 25 individuals (out of 50), with elevated δ 13 C and/or δ 15 N values in the ribs compared to the long bones, which points toward a communal type of diet and reveals organizational aspects of the institution.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it