Customer Reviews

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Paleopathology

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If you want to know anything about paleopathology, this is the book you want to use. It is easy to understand and great as a reference book. The authors cover every aspect of pathology from bone to soft tissue...definitely a must-have if you need the best pathology reference book out there.

That's all that really needs to be said about it. This book is mind-blowing. It's huge and comprehensive for those who need a reference not only for diagnosis, but histology and pathology.

This is a very helpful book for people in forensic science, bioarchaeology, or even medicine. It's got concise descriptions and excellent photos of the various pathological processes that act against the human skeleton.

If this book peaks your interest, it's also worth your time to take a look at Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains, Second Edition by Donald Ortner

I've found this tome useful in my own research and future publication as to Cancer Causation. The author gives a number of cases of almost certain and highly probable ancient cancers. He also states, quite correctly, that because 90% of present day cancers occur in people over 55...and...because most ancient people died before 55, we can reasonably expect that few ancient remains will show evidence of cancer.

Besides that, the vast majority of ancient remains consist of bone, more often than not incomplete skeletons and, bony lesions secondary to cancer are present in the minority of cases, even today, the incidence of detectable ancient cancers is reduced even further.

These, and other problems associated with examination of ancient remains means that detectable ancient cancers will be uncommon enough to render statistical analysis and comparisons with present day cancers virtually impossible. About all we can say is that ancient cancers did exist and are occasionally detectable especially as osteolytic and osteoblastic metastases. Like many other pathology experts, I think the author makes a mistake to emphasize the role of 'carcinogens'. Unfortunately this term has become almost synonymous with 'mutagens' which is surely a mistake. He mentions ancient and present day astestos which is a carcinogen but not a mutagen. He suggests that certain cancers might be expected to be less common in ancient people because of the absence of modern day, industrial 'carcinogens'. Maybe a little bit but my thought is that such modern day 'pollutants' increase cancer incidence only slightly.