Question: Have you ever studded anyone that was sick

K. Lindsay Hunter answered on 12 May 2015:

I haven’t studied anyone that was actively sick, though some of the dead people I’ve met had very not-so-nice ends to their lives. These were mostly the ones that were bones, bc modern dissection collections have strict rules about not accepting body donations from people that had certain communicable diseases. Bone collections tend to be at least 50 years old (it’s not a common practice to curate bones now), and a lot of times they weren’t that picky about disease, with a lot of the bones coming from people that were wards of the state (they couldn’t pay for a funeral). Sometimes bone collections are from excavations, and then you end up with a grab bag of diseases (I saw TB the most, since I studied ribs)—I even saw a Neanderthal that had a bone infection from a stone point!