[lizma]

I bet your thinking goiter.

Gout is a disease where uric acid builds up in the joints and causes swelling and pain. Usually attributed to a diet rich in red meat, dairy, and internal organs.

It may not have been seen in Romans because their diet was much more based on grain, fowl and fish. Even if they had kidney damage with a diet low in uric acid they may not have developed gout.

From what I've read, large amounts of lead have been found in the remains of Romans dependent on a lead plumbing system.

[blam]

"I bet your thinking goiter."

Yup, as soon as I saw the word 'goiter', I knew I was wrong. When I was a kid, I remember my great aunt having one on her neck.

[Renfield]

"...From what I've read, large amounts of lead have been found in the remains of Romans dependent on a lead plumbing system...."

The lead plumbing system played a part, but much more lead was introduced into the bodies of Romans because of the following practice: The Romans drank a lot of wine, but they weren't able to preserve wine as well as we are nowadays, so it often went "off"...i.e., became sour because of lactic or acetic fermentation. Furthermore, it was shipped around the Mediterranean in amphorae that were lined with pitch, to prevent leakage and spoilage; so, much wine that had not yet spoiled still tasted like pitch (this is, I suspect, the origin of the Greek Retsina). So, to make wine palatable for banquets and festivals, Romans mixed it with concentrated grape juice. The juice was concentrated by boiling it down to a syrup in lead vessels. The acidity of the grape juice (pH 3.5 or so) makes lead much more soluble, and this concentrated juice was extremely high in lead. The wealthier Romans had more lead in their bodies than peasants.

I recently attended a lecture by a soil scientist who has worked for many years alongside archaeoligists all over the world, but particularly in the Middle East and Italy. He showed some slides of a villa of one of the Roman emperors that they had recently excavated. He had tested the soil over the (very large) site for heavy metals, and found abnormally high concentrations of lead in the soil surrounding the residential part of the compound; and he wondered aloud what could be the reason. I related to him the above method of sweetening wine, and speculated that the high lead resulted from many years of drunken Romans urinating and vomiting their lead-laden wine in the yard during bacchanalian revelries. He wa skeptical, but I'm sure that was the reason.

As an aside, I have a Greek friend who claims that the ancient Greeks put pitch in their wine just to keep the Romans from stealing it!