The electron microscope in palaeopathology.

INTRODUCTION Tim earliest palaeopathological studies were made in the eighteenth century and were concerned with the results of trauma and disease in fossil animals. In 1825 Granville made a careful macroscopic study of a Ptolemaic mummy and diagnosed ovarian dropsy: this was almost certainly an instance of cystadenocarcinoma of the ovary. Twenty-seven years later Johan Czermak, a distinguished Viennese laryngologist, made the first microscopic studies of ancient mummified tissues. He employed simple but effective methods, teasing out the tissues in a solution of caustic soda. He was also a pioneer, being the first person to use a micrometer in the study of such preparations. The light microscope was therefore employed more than one hundred years ago in palaeohistological investigation. A long fallow period followed, broken only by some obscure investigations made by Fouquet in 1889 (Moodie 1921) until in 1904 Wilder made sections of Peruvian mummy and dried Utah Amerindian bodies following rehydration of the tissues in a solution of caustic potash. Notlong afterwards Shattock (1909) made frozen sections of portions of the calcified aorta of the Pharaoh Merneptah given to him by Grafton Elliot Smith. At about this time Ruffer commenced his classical palaeopathological studies in Cairo (Sandison 1967b). He issued a series of papers from the year 1910 until his tragic death at sea in 1917. Those published in 1909, 1910, 1911 are of histological interest. They may readily be consulted in the collected works edited by Roy Moodie (1921). Ruffer employed a rehydrating fluid which contained alcohol and sodium carbonate and which is still used today (Sandison 1963b). Further light microscope studies came from Wilson (1927), Williams (1927, 1929), Aichel (1927), Simandl (1928), Shaw (1938), Busse-Grawitz (1942), Giurtler and Langegger (1942), Graf (1949), Schlabow et al. (1958), Rowling (1961) and Sandison (1955, 1957, 1959, 1962, 1963a, 1963b, 1967a, 1967b, 1968). The majority of these studies were made on Egyptian mummies but others included Egyptian Canopic material, and tissues from Peruvian mummies, a Guanche body, Amerindian bodies, German and Scandinavian Moorleichen, and Scandinavian and British skeletal material. For an assessment of these investigations reference may be made to Sandison (1963b).