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During an archaeological excavation at a mediaeval monastery (Flor da Rosa, Crato, Portugal), a skeleton of a adult woman was found with two calcifications in the thoracic cage. The location and the macroscopic analysis of the calcifications allowed them to be assigned as pleural plaques. Spectrometric analysis and scanning electronic microscopy enabled to establish that it originated with an infectious process. These results associated with the lesions found in the ribs and vertebrae strongly suggest tuberculosis as the cause of these pleural plaques.

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Discovered in 1908 in a lead coffin conserved in a stone sarcophagus, the mummy of the “Fin-Renard” from Bourges, central France, was immediately identified as that of a gallo-roman child. The circumstances of his death as the extraordinary conservation of his body were the object of many conclusions related to contemporaneous medicohistorical knowledge and limited by partial investigation potentiality. The preparation of the exhibition Maternité et petite enfance dans l’Antiquité Romaine” (“Maternity and childhood in Roman Antiquity”) presented at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle at Bourges in 2003/2004 necessitated the reexamination of the body. The application of the most actual paleopathological methods and techniques permitted a more precise observation of this unique but surprising French specimen. However, after many radiographic, scannographic, fibroscopic and microscopic studies, the little mummy conserves many of its mysteries