Rethinking frailty: Study exposes resource gaps between genders in medieval history

By Stephanie Godward, communications and marketing director, College of Arts & Sciences

University of Louisville Assistant Professor of Anthropology Kathryn Marklein recently co-authored a study that produced jarring results contradicting past literature about the stress markers and lifespans of female and male-presenting individuals, with new indications of resource disparities between the two. 

A former Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society (CCHS) Bingham Faculty Fellow at UofL, Marklein sheds light on how social and cultural factors — such as the preferential treatment of individuals presenting as males — have influenced health outcomes throughout history.  

"These findings bring to light past disparities that still haunt and affect us today,” Marklein said. “It's heartening to have results that expose these realities, as it equips us with knowledge and toolkits for such conversations.”  

Her research, alongside colleagues from Ohio State University and other institutions, is redefining how we understand sex, health and disease across time. She worked with co-author Samantha Yaussy, assistant professor at James Madison University. The opportunity to participate in this study was quite pragmatic, Marklein said, as the curated skeletal remains in London from the medieval period opened her to research a time outside of her typical focus area. Her personal interest is specifically in the Roman and pre- and post-Roman periods, examining imperialism and the effects of empire on peripheral communities.  

"The reason I've been working on medieval London populations in particular is related to my work on frailty and thinking about how our bodies degenerate over time and how this is both a sign of aging and also a sign of resilience,” Marklein states. “I came to medieval London because of the skeletons who are curated there and the number of individuals we could study.” 

Together with their co-authors, the team examined cumulative markers for stress in the modern period, which were applied to the medieval skeletal series they were studying. This involved a novel approach at looking at frailty in skeletal remains, along with the specific differences in female-presenting and male-presenting individuals from medieval London. Ultimately, what they found contradicted findings in past literature, which surprised Marklein and the team. 

“There's a lot of past research that has shown how females tend to live longer than males and so incur more signs of morbidity and stress on their bodies over time, and males tend to not live as long. Our results should have played out that way, with females living longer and also having higher rates of this cumulative frailty. But ultimately the results were the same,” Marklein said. “The frailty was comparable between individuals [females and males], and males and females were living to the same age.” 

The lack of difference in frailty for male-presenting and female-presenting skeletal remains indicated that something was at play in this time period that was leading to a disparity between males and females, because females should have lived longer if they had equal access to resources that the males did.  

“But instead, we are seeing them living just as long and also having comparable levels of frailty,” Marklein said.  

The study’s findings reflect disparities between males and females within this medieval time period that are especially detrimental to the female experience. This could include things like access to food and medical resources, differences in work conditions and types of stress that come from gendered identity, like roles of caretakers or mothers.  

“We find in this period that females are dying from childbirth or might have stressors that accumulate because of motherhood and caretaking. So, seeing these disparities play out on the skeleton in a way that was very apparent was also very jarring,” Marklein said. 

Marklein discovered her love for bioarchaeology by signing up for a course during her freshman year at Emory University called, “Reading the bones of the ancient dead” in order to meet a writing requirement. A Biology and Latin double major at that time, she learned in the course how researchers can reconstruct past lives through individual skeletal remains. The experience impacted her so much that by the end of college, she had changed her majors to anthropology and classics. 

“It was really compelling, and there was a graduate student who started to tell me all these intimate details about the individual from their skeleton; I thought that it was incredibly fascinating,” she said. 

From there, she was hooked on the field of study and further encouraged by a professor to pursue bioarchaeology. She then completed graduate programs in the United Kingdom. 

“I love the ability to tell stories of people in the past and also, I love to travel and meet new people. This field provides those opportunities,” Marklein said. 

She encourages students exploring their academic and career options to experience the community that can form around research that ignites personal passions. 

“It’s important for students to know that research can be amicable and supportive, and it doesn't have to be cutthroat,” Marklein said. “In my experience, the best science happens when people with different experiences and types of expertise work together.”