Stanford scans of mummy featured at “Very postmortem: Mummies and medicine”
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A 2,500-year-old priest named Irethorrou will be teaching anatomy to all comers in an exhibition beginning Oct. 31. The mummified remains of this onetime inhabitant of a Middle Egyptian city will be on display in his coffin at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, along with a reconstruction of Irethorrou’s head.
The reconstruction is based on determinations of his bone structure that were part of an intensive series of state-of-the-art scans conducted in August by Stanford University School of Medicine radiologists, processed into a visual format by Stanford information technologists, and interpreted by an Egyptologist with a penchant for mummies from the town of Akhmim, the spot in ancient central Egypt where Irethorrou was found.
A Palo Alto-based software company, Fovia Inc., further wove the radiological data into a three-dimensional “fly-through” movie. Shown on a wall-mounted high-definition monitor in the exhibit gallery, the film will present visitors with visual navigations through the mummy’s anatomy, zooming in to inspect what remains of his internal organ systems and then swooping back out through the wrappings. It’s even possible to see objects, such as small amulets, buried with the mummy and hidden from view since its burial. The exhibition, “Very postmortem: Mummies and medicine,” will continue through summer 2010 at the Legion of Honor, which is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Excerpted from an article by Bruce Goldman for med.standford.edu
