Statistical Survey on the Soldiers’ Odontogram of the Crimean War (1853-1856) Found in Sevastopol

Crimean War, 1853-1856. Recently, a mass grave has been exhumed which contained the bodies of numerous French soldiers who had died during the confrontation. An archaeological mission was immediately launched. As far as dental research was concerned, the mission resulted to a forensic analysis followed by an epidemiological and historical study that yielded the following results.


INRAP (the French National Institute for Preventive
Archaeological Research), who was leading a mission at the royal vault of Cléry. M. Georges asked me once again to help him in the context of the exhumation of a mass grave which contained the bodies of French soldiers who had died during the Crimean War.
Objective: Producing the odontogram of the jaws which had been removed in the mass grave and carrying out a subsequent dental epidemiological study.

Material and Equipment:
Files of photographs of all the jaws and hardware of color shade-scale, and brightness. The study was carried out from photographs rather than from the bone pieces which had not been provided.

Potential Sources of Error:
• The quality of the photographs (negative effects, troubles with brightness, etc.); • The photographer's absent-mindedness who took some photographs of the same jaws several times, therefore suggesting other individuals, whereas they were the same; • The classification allocated to each picture used by the photographer was never the same and made it more difficult to analyse. The latter labelled the following information on the photographic file to identify the several negative effects on the photography of the same jaw: 54; 54bis; 54ter or 54. -Accident risk of evolving wisdom teeth: . 58 wisdom teeth remained in their sockets; . 14 teeth sockets of wisdom teeth were visible, those of postmortem missing teeth.
The risk of having a subsequent infection due to a wisdom tooth compared to the other teeth was therefore of 8,18 %.
Example of the mandible and maxilla of the case 58 [1].
Example of the mandible and of the maxilla of the case 63 [1].  He kept a collection of the moulds of deviceshe made for the casualties in his dental office. Nowadays, some of these items can be seen in the Val-de-Grâce museum. were among the reasons which caused serious digestive disorders and oral pathologies.

Maxilla
In the first case of study, the soldiers suffered from the multiplication of gingivitis and periodontitis that resulted to scaling and numerous extractions, which then led them to dental implant clinics.
In the second case, the young soldiers from 20 to 30 years old were struck by an upsurge of fast-paced tooth decay generally causing pulpitis and disabling dental abscesses.
He eventually noted that: "Three men from a land company who had received rational nutrition mainly made up of fresh vegetables were sent to dental implant clinics for a longer period than the three soldiers coming from a neighbouring company whose diet was ill-prepared and mainly made up of meat." Bourgeois implied that a healthy diet unquestionably affected the periods of post-extraction healing. [3].
In both cases, when their dentures were severely altered or degraded, the oldest soldiers who were fitted usually crowded the hospitals due to gastro-intestinal problems. Moreover, even a temporary lack of dentures caused phonetic disorders and affected soldiers in command.