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Even in the imagined-good old days, the phrase "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" could mean simply that the king had head lice. A medical case report tells in detail the scalpy woes of Ferdinand II of Aragon.
Ferdinand, who became king of Naples, crawled or trod the Earth during the years 1467 to 1496. Head lice crawled or trod the king's scalp, still, for a time after that.
The mummified remains of the entire community of Ferdinand and his lice lived on, so to speak, in Naples, in the sacristy of the Basilica of San Domenico Maggiore. Several years ago, a team of scientists, from the University of Pisa and the University of Rome "La Sapienza", went to work on the mummy with a scanning electron microscope and an array of chemico-analytical instruments.
Their report appears in a 2009 issue of the Brazilian medical journal Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. It states, with obvious pride: "This is the first time that these parasites have been found in the hair of a king, demonstrating that even members of the wealthy classes in the Renaissance were subject to louse infestation."
The report makes clear that Ferdinand's was not simply a case of head lice. Ferdinand's top surface hosted one kind of head louse, and one of his lower surfaces boasted another. The report explains: "Examination of the head hair and pubic hair … revealed a double infestation with two different species of lice, Pediculus capitis, the head louse, and Phthirus pubis, the pubic louse."
The mixed-race head louse population was just part of the complexity under and behind which Ferdinand ruled. Ferdinand, or persons working on his behalf, evidently applied a mercury-rich compound to the royal hair while Ferdinand was alive. Probably, the substance was meant to bring doom to the lice. Mercury had, even then, a long history of being used medicinally against the little vermin.
The same research team, with a few added players, published a study about Ferdinand's mercury-rich hair in 2011, in the journal Medical History. They point out that mercury was sometimes used for another purpose: treating persons who ailed from a particular sexually transmitted disease. But they rule this out in the case of Ferdinand, saying "the concentration of mercury found in the king's hair is much too high for it to be ascribed to antiluetic [anti-syphillis] treatments, and suggests rather a topical usage instead".
Though possibly syphilis-free, Ferdinand did cram some colourful living into the last of his 29 years. During those months, he became king of Naples and "married his aunt Giovanna of Aragon, the half-sister of his father Alfonso, and died of malignant tertian malaria a few months later".
(Thanks to Erwin Kompanje for bringing this to my attention.)
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