Roy Lee Moodie (1880–1934) and the beginnings of palaeopathology

Abstract

Roy Lee Moodie was a geologist whose interest in ancient disease was stimulated by his finding of pathological change in some of the fossils that he studied, including many from the Rancho La Brea site in California. He occupied teaching positions in Chicago, Dallas and Santa Monica and in 1928 began an acquaintance and a correspondence with Henry Wellcome who was then in the United States and appearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. Moodie persuaded Wellcome to sponsor his palaeopathological work and the following year he was appointed palaeopathologist to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (WHMM) at a salary of six thousand dollars a year, the first person to hold such a title and the first and only occupant of the title at the WHMM or its successor organisations. He published extensively from 1915 until his death in 1934, including his great compendium Paleopathology; an Introduction to the Study of Ancient Evidences of Disease, and the collected papers of Sir Marc Armand Ruffer. He is perhaps best remembered or, at least, most widely quoted for attributing the beginnings of palaeopathology to a publication of Esper in 1774 although the passage in which he did so contained two major errors that have been perpetuated in the literature ever since, the authorship of the publication and the diagnosis of the lesion that he supposed began the study of disease in antiquity.