What killed Dr Granville's mummy?
Well…a mummy can’t be killed, but now that we’ve got your attention this is the title of a thrilling article about Augusto Bozzi, an adventurous Italian born, traveling troupe player and medicine doctor who escaped Napoleon’s threat to press him into his army, went from one country to another contracting all kinds of diseases, learned English in the West Indies, married an Englishwoman and ended setting up practice in London, swapping the name Bozzi for Granville, the name of his English grandmother.
In 1821, at the height of mummy mania in Britain, Dr. Granville conducted one of the first autopsies on the mummy of a Theban lady. Among his findings:
The woman was between 50 and 55. She had borne children. The cause of death was body was ovarian dropsy – the earliest documented case of ovarian cancer.
The body was not mummified according to Herodotus eyewitness account in which the internal organs were removed through an incision in the abdomen and preserved separately. This mummy had no abdominal incision and most of the organs were intact and in place.
The body must have been kept in a bath of warm liquid wax and bitumen as a mummification method.
WHEN Egyptologist John Taylor joined the British Museum in the late 1980s, he found storerooms piled high with boxes. During the second world war, the museum’s collections had been moved out for safety. Although returned soon afterwards, some had not been touched since. Exploring one such storeroom, Taylor came across a large wooden chest. Inside were two trays, each divided into compartments, and each compartment contained a piece of an Egyptian mummy. Taylor had rediscovered what was left of Augustus Granville’s once-famous mummy.
Since 1990, a team of investigators has re-examined the remains using modern scientific methods. Their findings will be published next year. So how much had Granville got right?
One thing he couldn’t know was the identity of his mummy, because Egyptologists hadn’t yet deciphered the language of the ancient Egyptians. From the inscriptions on her coffin, we now know she was Irtyersenu, a “lady of the house”. Granville couldn’t know when she had lived, either: the style of the coffin and radiocarbon dating place her in the early 6th century BC.
In Granville’s day, pathology was in its infancy, but he was right about the ovarian tumour. Pathologist Eddie Tapp examined sections of the uterus, ovaries and tubes and confirmed that Irtyersenu had a tumour, but it seems to have been benign. “Granville’s diagnosis was in the right area but the tumour wasn’t fatal,” says Taylor. So what did kill her?
Tapp found signs of inflammation in the lungs, perhaps caused by pneumonia. Further research found traces of the TB bacterium and suggested that she might have had malaria. “We can’t say what the ultimate cause of death was,” says Taylor. “All of these are contenders.”
When it came to the mummification, Granville had been right in part. “He was correct that what was done to this mummy doesn’t correspond to anything in Herodotus. And he was right that they used a cheap method – although the latest theory is that the liquid used was some sort of preservative that would preserve the organs in situ.”
As for the body in the warm wax bath – there he was way off, says Taylor. Rebecca Stacey, a chemist at the British Museum, analysed the waxy material from the chest and found neither bitumen nor beeswax. What then was the wax Granville found in such abundance that he could make candles from it? When a body decomposes, fats break down to form what’s known as adipocere, or “gravewax”. “It’s an unsettling thought,” says Taylor, “but we think his candles were made from adipocere.”
Excerpted from an article by Stephanie Pain for NewScientist
UPDATE: DNA tests on mummy show TB killed Irtyersenu
A combination of DNA amplification with a recently developed technique to search for a short repetitive section of DNA from Mycobacterium tuberculosis have identified the organism in tissue from the lungs, bone and gall bladder.The tests also found biomarkers specific to the cell wall of the bacterium in the lungs and bones.
Together, these results suggest that tuberculosis infection had spread from her lungs to the rest of her body – so-called disseminated TB. In ancient Egypt, this would have been fatal, says Helen Donoghue of University College London, who led the current analysis of the mummy.
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