Contribution of Teeth to Confirm Diagnosis of Plague in Marseille, France (1720-1722)

Plague is an infectious disease caused by a Gram-negative bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and has affected human populations in different pandemics for at least 5000 years. The last plague epidemic in France occurred at the beginning of eighteenth century in Marseille, in southeast France. Marseille is today France's second largest city. It is the main French Port on the Mediterranean coast of Provence (southeast France) and it has been an important place of trade and passage since ancient times. Archives have shown that Marseille has been affected by the plague many times, but it was the last epidemic of 1720-1722 that left the most durable and hard memory.

In biological anthropology, teeth and especially dental pulp, provide useful material in paleomicrobiology to better understand the natural history of infectious diseases and their evolution. In these historical and anthropological contexts, the aim of this article was to remind the history of plague in Marseille and show how teeth are essential anthropological remains in the help of diagnosis of an epidemic disease and more generally to better understand the evolution of a disease over time.