The BA Festival of Science: Death by bladder stone
Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
This morning I went to see a speaker talk about the tragic death of a young girl, killed by a chronic urinary tract infection. This infection resulted in the growth of bladder stone, leading after some years to renal failure and finally death.
Why is this special?
Because this girl died between 1,000 and 1,300 years ago and the rare find of a urinary stone provides a wealth of data for forensic scientists.
Sophie Beckett, a forensic scientist from Cranfield University, analysed the stone found with skeleton 3010, one of 300 individual Anglo-Saxon burials at the appropriately named Boneyard field in Sedgeford, Norfolk, on the east coast of England.
The skeleton was able to give clues to the child’s age (13 to 15 years old) and showed a history of poor nutrition and disease; but the discovery of the urinary stone by a very careful archaeology student, fresh from a lecture on such stones that form in the body, gave clues to the child’s gender and untimely death.
Urinary stone discoveries are rare at archaeological sites because they look like pebbles. They may also degrade in the environment, and in this case the fact that part of the stone had eroded allowed the archaeologists to see the layered structure and helped them realise that this wasn’t just a pebble.
Beckett says the analysis of the chemical, crystalline and physical composition of the 3.5cm long stone led to their conclusion that it was a female child with a urinary tract infection (UTI) that caused the stone to form in bladder. The chemical composition (bioapatite and Whitlockite), and the hollow centre with some organic residue showed that it was caused by a UTI. The chemical composition also showed that it was mostly likely not a kidney stone, with the size suggesting it would have been in the bladder. The gender of the child was suggested by the fact that UTIs are more common in girls (well this is an archaeology story) and the size of the stone together with other evidence from the teeth suggests that it all ended in renal failure, and death.
