Diagnosing the Dead

What does our treatment of the dead tell us about ourselves?

Our about page says that the “goal of Sensible Medicine is to showcase a range of ideas and opinions about all things bio-medicine.” Today’s post fully embraces the range thing.

Shannon Lee Dawdy is an archaeologist and professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is active on the Chronoscope Substack. This post will appear, in full, for free there next week, but we are pleased to offer it today as a gift to our paid subscribers. To me, it speaks to how 21st-century medicine’s tendency to turn people into patients can even turn people who lived hundreds — or even thousands — of years ago into modern patients.

A recent article in the New York Times highlighted a study at the University of Southern California in which two Egyptian mummies underwent a “virtual autopsy” via CT Scan. This project is not groundbreaking. Back in 1977, archaeologist Nicholas Millet and pediatrician Peter Lewin scanned the remains of Nakht, a 14-year-old Egyptian weaver who had died around 1200 BC. Before that, X-rays were used. Just one year after Wilhelm Röntgen took the first X-ray in 1895, a German physicist tried the new technology on a mummified cat.

We have long been fascinated by mummies. We want to unwrap them and learn their secrets. Between the 12^th and 18^th centuries, tombs in Egypt were looted not just for gold, but for another kind of relic – human remains. Mumia, or mummy powder, was purveyed throughout Europe as a cure for everything from internal bleeding to epilepsy. With the advent of scientific medicine in the 18^th century, mummies were no longer ground up and eaten, but mummy fever did not subside. During the Victorian era, Egyptian mummies were unwrapped in public spectacles in European and American cities, with scientists of the day acting as masters of ceremony.

Since then, medicine and archaeology have collaborated in less theatrical ways. We have the established subfields of bioarchaeology, forensic archaeology, paleopathology, and now paleoradiology. But what caught my eye in this recent article was the framing of ancient Egyptians as modern medical patients.