Leaderboard

Interesting question about the oddly shaped neck depicted......Goiter was still endemic in the backwoods of southern Italy at my last visit 45 y/a, caused by Iodine deficiency, but easily avoided by even occasional ingestion of seafood. One only needs to replace about 5 mg over the course of a lifetime. Fish was probably a regular component of an emperor's diet. Goiter from deficiency would be unlikely. Goiter from hypothyroidism is a possibility, but.... A search for "images of Claudius" shows us many statues, none of which show a goiter, but all seem to show a long neck. One can speculate on how much license the sculptors took to depict the emperor in an aesthetically pleasing way....I wonder if the coins, focusing on just the head & neck, accentuating an actually long neck, give an anatomically exaggerated view of the sternocleidomastoid muscle....explaining why that swelling is positioned so far laterally/posteriorly from where a goiter would expected? Other causes of swelling in the neck would include lymphoma, untreated often causing bulky adenopathy, with a median survival in excess of 5 yrs-- long enough to live to be poisoned later.