1. If it’s newly discovered—either
in a tomb in Egypt or the apartment of a hermit
2. If it’s part of a new exhibit
3. If it goes through a medical
imaging process
4. If it resurrects from its
sarcophagus to unleash shambling terror
Massachusetts General Hospital recently surprised me with a
new reason. It invited the public to come see a live mummy restoration. Wait, no.
They invited the public to see a mummy restoration, live. You can tell which of
those four headlines I really, really want to read sometime.
There’s a lot of backstory on why a prestigious Massachusetts
hospital is treating dead Egyptians. The short answer is because one hangs out
there. I wrote about the whole thing in The New England Grimpendium and posted
a bunch of photos here on OTIS of the MGH mummy after my first visit to it,
back in December of 2009.
Here’s a quick summary, though: In 1823, MGH was gifted the
first complete Egyptian mummy-with-sarcophagus to ever come to the U.S. His
name was Padihershef, and he was a 40-year-old tomb carver from Thebes. They
toured the 2,500-year-old corpse around the country as a fundraising attraction
before retiring it to an operating theater in the Bullfinch Building, the original
home of MGH.
Later, the room would become the famous Ether Dome, the site
of the first public display of surgery under anesthetic, an operation that the
mummy watched bemusedly (“In my day, they’d trepan you with barely a whiff of
blue lotus.”).
Today, you don’t need an injury to visit the hospital to see
either the Ether Dome or its creamy mummy center. You just have to time it for
when the room is unoccupied by classes.
The Ether Dome is pretty simple to get to. True, the almost
200-year-old Bulfinch Building has become just a small part of the overwhelming
warren of medical facilities that is MGH. But just inside the main entrance of
the hospital is an information desk. You can ask for directions there, but
you’ve already done the hard part by walking into such an intimidating place.
Walk down the hallway behind the information desk and follow the signs to the K
elevator. Take that elevator to the fourth floor, where more signs will direct
you down a short hallway to the Ether Dome.
When I arrived, the camera that was dangling brazenly from
my neck and the Carl Kolchack mask wrapped proudly around my face got me
mistaken for press, and then Michelle Marcella, who manages public affairs for
MGH’s prodigious historical legacy and who personally introduced me to
Padihershef years ago, backed me as one. That meant I got unexpected early
access to the mummy, while everyone without a press pass had to wait in the
bleachers of the operating theater for their turn later on.
But that’s pretty cool, too. The Ether Dome is the classic
type of operating theater that you see in period movies. It’s small, and mostly
taken up by a semi-circle of tiered seats that rise a vertiginous five rows
from the floor. The floor itself was just that, and when not being taken over
by a mummy restoration usually features a podium surrounded by a large marble
statue of Apollo, a human skeleton, a massive painting depicting the surgery that gave the Ether Dome its name, and a case or two of antique medical
equipment. All that stuff was still there, but pushed to the sides for the
main attraction.
Above it all was the copper glint of the interior of the Bulfinch
Building dome, viewable outside from the courtyard just off Parkman Street,
where the original MGH building is swallowed up by the towers of the modern
hospital.
I got there right at the start of the four-hour restoration,
and the seats were already starting to fill with people that included doctors,
nurses, and other hospital staff, all spending their breaks away from live
patients to check out a dead one.
Padihershef and his sarcophagus had already been removed
from the pair of cases that had been its comfort zone for so many years and
laid out on three parallel tables on the operating floor. The two halves of the
sarcophagus, with their extremely well-preserved hieroglyphics, took up the
bookend tables, while the center spot was dedicated to the shriveled, black,
linen-wrapped body of the mummy.
A rope stretched across the width of the floor gave the
mummy a small bit of personal space, only penetrable by the conservator and the
official hospital crew who were recording the procedure. But being on the other
side of that tape still meant you were within just a couple of inches of naked,
black mummy cranium sticking cozily out of his papoosed body.
You could get close enough to see the shockingly white teeth,
the fuzz of hair on his head, and to feel kind of weird by the realization that
your mouth and nostrils are within inches of the flesh and bone of a person
preserved for millennia. I’m not sure why I’m phrasing the realization that
way.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of mummies in my day, but always with
at least a pane of glass between me and them. Getting so close to an open-air mummy was thrilling in
an all new way. Usually “mummy thrill” comes from the fact that you’re seeing an
ancient dead person who is also symbolic of an entire ancient culture. But this
was more real. Like I was seeing a mummy in high-def, really getting on some
personally unplumbed level that it was simultaneously an actual person, a
valuable artifact, and an ancient thing. After all, everything on my TV is
behind a pane of glass, too.
Speaking of TV, being on the floor with the media meant contending
with a small armory of television cameras and microphones and jostling
reporters and photographers treating Padihershef like a celebrity who’s only in
town temporarily to film a movie. Understandably, of course. They did at least
refrain from questioning him, aiming those at the blond, bespectacled woman arranging
her tools and about to get down to the mummy makeover.
Her name was Mimi Leveque, and she gave her title as
“Conservator of Objects” instead of “Master of Mummies,” which is the title I
would have printed on my business cards had I been her. She was asked so many
questions, that it was difficult for her to actually do the work that was the
whole point of the event.
But that was cool, too, because there is a lot of great
little factoids about this particular mummy.
Like Padihershef has never been unwrapped past his head, and
that scans have shown that his head is kept on his body with a broomstick, inserted
at some point in modern times, just like that scene in Idle Hands. Except I
think that was a meat fork. Also, that his brains are still in his skull
instead of having been fished out through his nose with a hook as is usually
the process. Also that one of his ears is prosthetic, made of linen. I don’t
have a movie reference for any of those latter facts.
In between answering questions, she got down to work, which
involved vacuuming dust from his lineaments and the leached salts that powdered
his head a dull white in places. For the more stubborn accretions, she used a
swab dabbed with her own saliva to gently break down the salt. Because I guess
licking its face was out of the question.
So, in many ways, it was a pretty mundane little
operation…that kept me spellbound for an hour and a half, and even then I only
reluctantly left for something that was pretty important at the time, I guess.
In thirty years, I’ll have long forgotten whatever else I did on that rainy
June day, but I’ll still be telling the story of the time I saw a mummy resurrect
from the dead after getting its face licked. My mind will have exaggerated the
story somewhat by that time.
On my way out of the theater, I noticed his old cases,
vertical antique things made of wood and glass, one of which had held the mummy
and the bottom half of the sarcophagus, the other the top of the sarcophagus. After
his cleaning, MGH was moving him on up to the proverbial East Side, putting
Padihershef in a brand new case that displayed him and his sarcophagus
together, horizontally to give the poor guy a rest, and better sealed than
those drafty old cases.
It was an excellent idea on the part of the MGH staff to let
people see this process firsthand and its mummy so directly. It’s the closest
I’ll ever get to the intimacy of a Victorian mummy unwrapping, I think, which
was a completely disreputable practice that damaged a lot of important archeological
objects during that time…but still sounds to me like an absolute blast.
I’m not sure I should have ended this piece with that
admission.
