Mummified 'Soap Lady' No
Urban Legend
[Original headline: Team unraveling mystery
of mummified 'Soap Lady']
PHILADELPHIA [AP] -- Sometime in the 19th century, a fat woman
died and her body changed almost entirely into soap.
It may sound like an urban legend, but researchers are serious.
On Thursday, they performed a CT scan on the woman's mummified body
hoping to learn more about the process that turns some corpses into
a waxy, soaplike substance called adipocere.
The body, dubbed "Soap Lady," has been on display for more than a
century at the Mutter Museum, a former haven for medical students
but now a Philadelphia tourist attraction featuring thousands of
medical oddities.
The CT scan unexpectedly revealed some organ tissue, raising hope
that researchers might be able to learn how the woman died.
"There's tons of stuff in there," said Gerald Conlogue, a
Quinnipiac University professor of diagnostic imaging. "What we may
be looking at is a shell or casing made out of this soapy substance
sealing out the outside environment."
Conlogue said the results will give researchers greater
understanding of saponification, the chemical conversion of fat into
adipocere.
Saponification is an unusual occurrence, dependent on factors
such as humidity, temperature, the presence of clothing and
bacterial activity.
The fatter the person, the greater the chance saponification will
occur.
Thursday's scan was the first time the Soap Lady had left her
wooden display table since 1874, when a prominent University of
Pennsylvania anatomist named Dr. Joseph Leidy donated the body to
the museum.
Leidy said that the Soap Lady, who was discovered by workers
removing bodies from an old burial yard, died in the late 1700s.
"The woman, named Ellenbogen, died in Philadelphia of yellow
fever in 1792 and was buried near Fourth and Race Streets,"
according to the original label attached to the exhibit.
Leidy's explanation stood until 1942, when museum curator Joseph
McFarland determined the Soap Lady had actually died in the 1800s
and that her name had been lost to history.
McFarland could find no record of any yellow fever deaths in
Philadelphia in 1792. A yellow fever epidemic did strike the city in
1793, but the name "Ellenbogen" appeared nowhere on an official list
of the dead. Furthermore, there was never a cemetery at Fourth and
Race.
A 1987 X-ray of the mummy showed eight straight pins and two
four-hole buttons manufactured in the 19th century.
"At this point, we know less about her than we thought we did
before," said Gretchen Worden, the Mutter's current curator.
The CT scan, a computer-enhanced image of areas that cannot be
seen by X-ray, was taped for a new television series called "The
Mummy Road Show," premiering Oct. 5 on the National Geographic
Channel.
The filming made for a bizarre scene: With the television crew
and museum workers eating cheese steak sandwiches a few feet away,
the blackened mummy slowly passed through a portable CT scanner in a
Mutter side room filled with large oil portraits of long-dead
Philadelphia physicians.
The Mutter was founded in 1849 by the Philadelphia College of
Physicians, which still operates it. Its exhibits include malformed
skeletons, a 27-foot-long human colon and a plaster cast of Siamese
twins Chang and Eng Bunker.
Story originally published by:
Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek / CA |
Michael Rubinkam - Sep 29.01
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