| Soap Lady Human Mummy | |
| |
| Biographical Information | |
|---|---|
| Name(s) | Unknown |
| Age | 25 - 35 |
| Sex | Female |
| Status | Civilian |
| Height | |
| Source | |
| Culture | North American (USA) |
| Date(s) | 19th Century |
| Site | Downtown Philadelphia |
| Current Location | |
| Location | Mütter Museum, of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia |
| Catalog # | |
In Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, the Soap Lady is one of its oldest and longest displayed specimens. She has been on display since her arrival at the museum, when Dr. Joseph Leidy, a prominent anatomist from the University of Pennsylvania known as the father of American vertebrate paleontology, donated her body.
According to him, the “Soap Woman” died in 1792, and her saponified body was uncovered by workmen as they removed bodies from an old graveyard in downtown Philadelphia in 1875, when the city went through improvements. She had a companion when she was exhumed: Soap Man, who was buried alongside her, has suffered the same fate - as the name suggests - and is in possession of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Much is known about the physical and chemical changes she went through to reach her current state, but almost nothing is certain regarding the woman herself, her name and cause of death, and scientific inquiry over the years has disproven much what was thought about her story.
The original informational card accompanying the body's display at the Mütter, now almost entirely proven wrong, stated:
"Body of a fat woman changed to adipocere; "petrified body." The woman named Ellenbogen, died in Philadelphia, of yellow fever in 1792 and was buried near Fourth and Race streets. The process of change is as follows: The nitrogenous tissue gives off ammonia, this attacking the fat of the body forms a hard soap. The form is well preserved."
Mummification[]
This specimen's name is both fitting and misleading. While she is called the Soap Lady, she is not actually made of soap, but is a saponified body.
Saponification is a process in which a body's fat tissue is chemically transformed into a substance called adipocere (from the Latin 'adeps', meaning fat, and 'cere', wax), a byproduct of decomposition. When it begins to form, it has a soft, greasy gray appearance, and because of this, saponified substances are also sometimes called "grave wax" or "corpse wax." As it ages, however, the substance hardens and turns brittle, but never loses its soapy, waxy texture.
The Soap Lady, resting peacefully at the Mütter Museum.
For a body to become saponified, it needs to be in an alkaline, warm, and sufficiently damp environment, where oxygen isn't present and anaerobic (oxygen deprived) bacteria thrive. When those conditions are present, the fat molecules suffer a process of hydrolysis, being split into fatty acids and glycerin, the main component of regular soap, and thus forming the adipocere. The consequential extraction of water from the bodies after this process turns them into an inhospitable ambient for most bacteria, hinder any further decompisition, and because this material is also not palatable to the insects that usually consume decomposing tissue, they are left relatively intact.
This means that saponification will stop the decaying process by encasing the body in a hard adipocere shell, turning it into a “soap mummy.” In the Soap Lady's case, she and her companion became saponified when ground water seeped into their caskets. The fact that she had been heavy in life contributes to the amount of adipocere formed.
Studies[]
The Soap Lady has intrigued guests and museum staff alike ever since she first arrived, but despite the attention, most of the more thorough studies conducted on her are relatively modern:
- 1942: Dr. Joseph McFarland, the then curator of the Museum, partook in a series of investigations about the acquisition, place of origin, and identity of the mummy, through the analysis of documents and data avaliable at the time;
- 1987: a team from the Thomas Jefferson University conducted radiographic examinations of the Soap Lady, with the help of a portable x-ray unit brought with them to the museum, as the fragile nature of the specimen forbade it from being moved. Anteroposterior, oblique and cross-table lateral images were obtained. In addition to the pathological evidence, the team found eight pins around her body, placed in a way that indicated they were used to fixate a funerary shroud around her body. These pins further debunked the 1792 date of death, as the shape of the pinhead was solid and rounded, characteristic of a machine process not invented until 1824;
- 2002: the Mütter Museum asked the Imaging Science and Information Systems Center (ISIS) at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, to run a CT scan on the mummy, again using a portable unit that was placed at the main ballroom of the Museum. Due to the delicate constitution of the specimen, the exam had to be done in turns, over the course of six hours, as to minimize the heat exposure. Skull radiographs and CT scans were taken;
- 2007: The Thomas Jefferson University team reunited to take another series of x-rays, now using a different, more sensitive and modern machine, which provided them with images of much better quality, that were then assessed by a physical/forensic anthropologist.
Pathology[]
Soap Lady's Cranial X-Ray, showing signs of a brain as well as fractures to the jaw.
After the studies, exams and analyses done over the years, we can list a solid set of characteristics for the Soap Lady.
Firstly, she appeared to be a corpulent woman, with wisps of fair hair still visible on her head. She was relatively young, with a healthy and robust skeletal structure, showing no signs of age-related degeneration, but had lost her teeth long before dying, as is evidenced by the remodelling of the jaw bone, which was found to be broken on both sides. The fracture pattern and lack of healing speak of post-mortem trauma.
Her organs were relatively well presereved, enough for some health conditions to be noticed: she had a 7-mm ureteral stone, an 8-mm gallstone, a calcified aorta and calcified arteries in the brain, along with a certain degree of brain atrophy. Those findings could be related to a poor diet and/or the presence of a vascular disease in life.
Her body lays in a supine position, with both arms straight and close to her sides. The most notable feature of this mummy, however, is her gaping mouth.
Additional[]
The original labels for both of Dr. Leidy's saponified specimens list them with “Ellenbogen” as their surname, and states that they'd both died of yellow fever in 1792, and were buried near Fourth and Race Streets, in Philadelphia, and this was the accepted information until further investigation took place, 65 years later. The surname Ellenbogen was searched for in death records, church listings, ship logs, etc., to no avail. There were no Ellenbogens in the city until after 1856, and no recorded deaths from yellow fever were made in 1792. Furthermore, it was also discovered that no bodies had been buried near Fourth and Race Streets at all despite the presence of three German churches in that area, as all of their cemeteries were elsewhere.
As the growing pile of evidence might suggest, Dr. Leidy's tale had been a little far from the truth. In fact, Joseph McFarland, the curator responsible for most of this investigation, found a compelling handwritten note in the archives of the library at The College of Physicians, where the museum works. It was a receipt, dated November 18, 1875, attesting that Leidy had actually paid two installments of $7.50 for the soap bodies, a sum that was later reimbursed by The College itself.
In conclusion, all of the Lady's backstory - besides the date of her exhumation - was fabricated. Even now, more than 140 years after she was first discovered, there is no definitive conclusion as to who she was or the circumstances of her death.
External Links[]
☀ Atlas Obscura: Soap on a Bone: How Corpse Wax Forms
☀ VELNIC, et al. The Study of Natural Saponification Processes in Preservation of Human Corpses. Bucharest: Revista de Chimie, 2017.