Paleopathology can be defined as the discipline that studies the diseases of the past populations through the examination of ancient human remains, both skeletonized and mummified.
In these last decades paleopathology has become an autonomous discipline, a new branch of medicine, but maintaining interdisciplinary characteristics; in fact, it utilizes contributes from different subjects, such as history, archaeology, physical anthropology and pathological anatomy. Paleopathology is different from the history of medicine for the type of approach. While history of medicine, in order to reconstruct the history of physicians and therapies, is based prevalently on indirect sources, historical and literary, paleopathology studies diseases directly in ancient human bodies.
Paleopathology has a double interest, anthropological and medical: anthropological, because from the features and the incidence of the different pathologies the habits and lifestyle of ancient populations can be reconstructed; medical, because the study of the origins of some important diseases of the present time, such as cancer and arteriosclerosis, and reconstruction of the first ways of diffusion of infectious diseases, have a great interest for the modern medicine.