September 19, 2010 — It’s easy to find mummies in large, well-funded museums. However, it’s more fun to find them elsewhere. In my travels, I’ve come across mummies in a crypt in Ireland, in the bathroom of an ex-train depot in West Virginia, and in a graveyard in Vermont. Right up there with those, is the mummy I found inside one of the world’s leading medical institutions, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dubbed by the hieroglyphics on its coffin Padihershef, this 2,500 corpse of a Theban stone-cutter was one of the first intact Egyptian mummies to come the U.S., where he found a place at MGH and ended up a mute (alright, dead) witness to one of the landmark moments in medical science, the first public surgery conducted under anesthesia. The patient, was under anesthesia, that is.
Padihershef is located in the historic Ether Dome in MGH, and was
present when the historic surgery was performed there in 1846
A medical skeleton from the 1800s
is also on display there.
A monument to the medical event was erected
in the Boston Public Garden, adjacent to the Common.
Padihershef himshelf.