Tea at Trianon: Tooth Enamel and Well-Being

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 15, 2013

Tooth Enamel and Well-Being

Health in a medieval village.

Accentuated striae (AS) are developmental defects in tooth enamel that form during periods of physiological stress, and have been used in skeletal studies to measure stress and health levels in past populations. However, the assumption that the presence of AS necessarily indicates poor health has not been sufficiently tested. This project builds on past research by investigating the relationship between AS and age at death, since the presence of more AS in younger individuals (those with a higher risk of dying) would support the relationship between AS and poor health. Analytical improvements for testing this relationship include a focus on individuals as the unit of analysis and the use of survival analysis, which corrects for some skeletal sample biases and allows for both juveniles and adults to be included. “Weak” and “strong” AS in permanent teeth from 85 medieval Danish skeletons (ages at death: 0-30 years) are identified in digital images of tooth thin sections and developed into individual defect chronologies using daily and long-period increments in enamel. Chronologies span the period from birth until death or canine crown completion, whichever occurs first. Survival analysis is used to test the relationship of AS in different periods of childhood to the risk of dying at subsequent ages. Weak AS occurring before age seven predict a lower risk of dying after age seven while strong AS show the opposite pattern. (Read entire article.)