PubMed1994
This study is interested in figurative works of the past in which the artist had seemingly no purpose to illustrate pathological manifestations and their display was merely casual. It deals with both scientific and humanistic aspects and is of relevance to pathologists, in that it provides further insights into the epidemiology of some disease. Also, it contributes to an ever increasing progress of knowledge of historical and geographical pathology. The author has been carrying out this study without following a definite pattern, guided only by chance and curiosity, and discovering that artists could sometimes portray to perfection malformations and morbid conditions which would later be identified and classified in medicine, thus anticipating and even emphasizing the expressiveness of descriptions in scientific works. In his study, referring to paleopathology (therefore, not necessarily only very ancient), the author intends to illustrate briefly different cases found and to dwell in particular on two conditions, dwarfishness and endemic goitre, whose representation is particularly frequent in figurative arts. Representations of dwarfishness, in several of their genotypic and phenotypic variations, exist particularly in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman and, in the American continent, pre-columbian art; and then, again in Europe, mostly in 15th and 16th century art, but also in the following centuries, in which statues of dwarfs and malformed people were placed even in public and private gardens as ornaments. There are mainly representations of primary digenetic dwarfishness (total or partial chondrodysplasia, Lobstein type osteopsathyrosis, Hurler and Morquio diseases and other thesaurismoses), but also secondary (dysendocrinous-hipopituitaric and hypothyroid-, and due to different types of rickets and to vertebral tuberculosis of Pott). Representations of dwarfs of different types are shown and commented, from the most ancient, through the masterpiece portraits of Spanish 17th century, up to modern times. As to the goitre, a set of its most significant portrayals in figurative arts is presented in chronological order beginning with the most ancient ones and focussing on Italian representations of the Nativity and the Passion of Christ, where the most striking infirmities and disabilities were mirrored and commonly accepted. As far as pathology is concerned, it is pointed out how, for a long time in the past, the goitre appears frequent and widespread. This condition reached such an extent that it could almost represent another type of people, playing at times the main characters not only, as said, in Christian iconography, which for many centuries was almost the only one to exist, but also in every day life.