Medical history: news about Beethoven, Empress Elisabeth, and Maximillian II

Excerpt

On one hand, this special issue deals with historical, but not ancient, specimens that have been stored in Vienna’s Narrenturm as a pathological-anatomical collection for almost two centuries. Interestingly, there is no specific term for that period of time. Therefore, such studies belong to the specific field of paleopathology, which is actually concerned with the prehistoric and ancient remains of human and animal tissues. The author of these lines used the term “cenopathology” instead [1] some time ago, which is derived from the New Earth Age, the Cenozoic. Cenopathology may therefore deal with specimens from the past hundred years; paleopathology, however, with those from the past thousands of years. …