Even in the imagined-good old days, the phrase “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” could mean simply that the king had head lice. A medical case report tells in detail the scalpy woes of Ferdinand II of Aragon.
Ferdinand, who became king of Naples, crawled or trod the Earth during the years 1467 to 1496. Head lice crawled or trod the king’s scalp, still, for a time after that.
The mummified remains of the entire community of Ferdinand and his lice lived on, so to speak, in Naples, in the sacristy of the Basilica of San Domenico Maggiore. Several years ago, a team of scientists, from the University of Pisa and the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, went to work on the mummy with a scanning electron microscope and an array of chemico-analytical instruments.
Their report appears in a 2009 issue of the Brazilian medical journal Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. It states, with obvious pride…
—So begins this month’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.
Here’s a detail from the study:
