The rich are different from you and me, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. But according to a new study in The International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, children of the Medicis, one of history’s wealthiest families, may have had rickets, a disease typically associated with the inferior diet and cramped living conditions of the poor. What’s more, the family’s wealth may have been to blame.
Division of Paleopathology, University of Pisa
The bended femurs of a 2-year-old member of the wealthy Medici family, indicating that the child may have had rickets.
A team of Italian researchers found evidence of the disease in the skeletons of nine 16th-century Medici children. Several of the skeletons had curved arm and leg bones — a telltale sign of walking or crawling on soft bones. One had a deformed skull.
Rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, which renders bones soft or malformed. In poor children, the disease often stems from malnutrition or a lack of sunlight from living in cramped, polluted cities.
But an analysis of the nitrogen isotopes in the bone collagen, which indicates the main source of protein in one’s diet, suggests they were fed breast milk — a poor source of vitamin D — until they were 2. And assuming the Medicis followed the custom of the time, they would have supplemented the breast milk only with soft bread and apples, which do not contain much of the nutrient.
The researchers said the children were probably deprived of sunlight, which spurs the body to make vitamin D. Wealthy children of that time were often tightly swaddled and kept inside, with suntans discouraged as signs of low standing. DOUGLAS QUENQUA
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