Some Interesting Findings in an Abolished Brno Cemetery in Antonínská Street

In 1999, skeletal remains of over a thousand individuals were recovered during a preservation archaeological research in Antonínská Street in Brno. This extensive osteological set comes from a former city cemetery in Malá Nová, which was used as the burial place for people from five Brno parishes between 1785 and 1883. An anthropological and palaeopathological analysis of the skeletons revealed traces of a postmortem opening of the cranial cavity on ten skulls found there (four men, three women, and three children). In all the cases, the calvarias were removed by means of a typical cut through the glabella, squamous bones, and the protuberantia occipitalis externa. The execution of the cuts clearly points to pathological or anatomical autopsies. In Brno, the first official autopsies were performed in 1871 at the dissecting room of the Provincial Public General Hospital in Pekafiská Street (now St. Anne’s Faculty Hospital). The first head of the Department of Pathology was Eduard Klenka z VlastimilÛ, who equipped his laboratory in line with modern principles of the renowned Viennese pathologist of Czech origin, Karel Rokitansk ̆. According to reports from that time, a total of 52 corpses (32 men and 20 women) were delivered to the laboratory in the first year of its operation. Post-mortems were performed on 35 of them. The most frequent causes of death at that time included infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis, syphilis, smallpox, and typhus fever. The skeletal remains with traces of autopsy reported here are among the oldest evidence of postmortem performed in Moravia and, together with similar findings from the cemetery at the St. Kliment church in Prague, they give us a better insight into the level of development of the medical science in the 18th and 19th centuries.