This is not directly related to Rome, but the Hamann-Todd Human Osteological Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History contains thousands of human skeletons derived from cadavers in the early part of the twentieth century. The collection includes a large number of pathological cases, from an era before antibiotics and the kind of corrective surgeries that are available to today's athletes.

One thing that occurs frequently in the collection is "locked" knees, where the person suffered an injury of some sort (there are sometimes signs of torn ligaments, broken kneecaps etc.) and the knee was then immobilized with a brace (a common treatment at the time). The result of this is that by the time the person dies, the knee joint has fused into a solid ball of bone, with the knee being of course completely immobilized as a result.

The really interesting thing about the pathology collection in general is how debilitating and permanently crippling many of these injuries were, yet how long the individuals continued living despite them (it is admittedly probably easier to do so in twentieth-century America than in ancient Rome). A person with a frozen knee would have just kept dragging his stiffened leg around with him, year after year.

Gratuitous pathology story: the worst skeleton in the collection by far is from an old woman with terrible scoliosis. Her spine went up, then forward, then straight down, with her skull pointed forward from there; her ribs were splayed out from her spine in almost random directions. She would have lived for years in this condition.