Exhibit: Medieval Norwegian Coins, And A King's Illness

Very interesting, DV, thank you.

Here's the "numismatic medical history" of George III put together on a single coin:

No wonder George 1V didn't like Pistrucci's work, and was instrumental in relieving him of his duties!

For most people's tastes, the portraiture is too brutal.

Nevertheless, Pistrucci made 'Moonshine While the Hay Grows' with his famous work of St George and the Dragon.

Unfortunately, I had a friend who died of hyperthyroidism, caused by an unidentified infection. Very sad.

I an always wary of speculation that attempts to definitively link unusual artistic representations with some kind of modern medical diagnosis. I'm reminded of the people that find all sorts of "diseases" that Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten was allegedly afflicted with, judgements based solely on the radically different artwork used to portray him compared with the pharaohs before and after. When in truth a more mundane explanation is far more likely: Akhenaten abolished the old order of things and drove their practitioners into hiding - including all the artisans and craftsmen. New ones had to be trained up or imported, who would logically have no artistic connection to those who came before. After Akhenaten was got rid of, the old knowledge came back out of hiding once more. I liken it to "Soviet art": as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, everybody re-remembered their old artistic traditions.

In the Øystein/Sigurd case, the problem is lack of evidence one way or the other. The "bug-eyes" are only found on a single carved head, which dates from a decade or two after the king had died. If more busts or other clearly identifiable artistic portrayals were found with the feature, and if similarly carved busts were found of Sigurd or any other Norwegian king from the same time period and/or artistic tradition that clearly didn't have bulging eyes, that might be a more persuasive argument.


Royal portraits of the ancient and mediaeval period are intended to show the ruler as strong and capable. If the ruler was actually weak and deformed, the portraits never showed this - that would be seen as an open invitation for their neighbours to attack and conquer a defenceless country.

Some medical conditions, however, came to be seen as evidence to true-bred nobility, and would therefore be included in the portraiture. The Hapsburg Jaw is a more modern example that comes to mind.

An example I can think of on ancient coinage is the Royal Wart on the coins of Parthia. The "wart" is generally assumed to be a trichoepithelioma, a mole-like lesion that hereditarily forms in much the same place on the face. The first king to prominently display the disfigurement on his coinage was Mithridates II (c. 123 BC). One can assume that his father Artabanus I or one of his predecessors has such a wart (which, in the Greek perfectionist art tradition of the day, was omitted from the coinage of that king) but was noticed and remembered, and included on Mithridates II's coinage as proof of his legitimate succession. And it was a continued (if not entirely consistent) feature of royal portraits until the overthrow of the empire several hundred years later, long after the genetic line that carried susceptibility to trichoepithelioma formation should have gone extinct. Apparently the later claimants to the throne that lacked a genuine tumour even took to wearing a wax prosthetic wart in an effort to boost their claims to legitimacy.

The Hapsburg Emperors suffered from the heredity problem of 'hogsmouth', which is obviously displayed on the coins.