Dead Men, and Women, Tell Tales in Museum’s Exhibition

While everyone else has been trimming trees and decking halls with boughs of holly, curator Rose Tyson has had her hands filled this Christmas season with bones: human bones and mummies.

Tyson has organized the Museum of Man’s latest exhibit, “Mummies, Mayhem and Miseries,” which consists of thousands of bones plus a couple of Egyptian and Mexican mummies. A grisly but fascinating display, it is designed to illustrate how skeletal remains and mummified tissues provide scientists with a tell-tale record of cultures, disease and genetic defects.

“We did an exhibit of bodies and bones seven years ago that was highly popular,” Tyson said, during a quick walk past the displays. “This was a chance for us to show the Stanford-Meyer collection of bones donated by Stanford University.”

The museum just completed cataloguing the collection, which was donated to the museum in 1981.

“We’ve had a lot of researchers from UC San Diego Medical Center study the bones,” she said. “About 12 papers have been done on this collection since we’ve had it.”

While the significance of some of the skeletal aberrations and deformations may not be apparent to the untrained eye, the average visitor cannot fail to notice the effects on bones of certain diseases.

The awful pain of osteoarthritis can be envisioned in ball joints that have been polished to an unnatural shine because degenerative disease has destroyed the cartilage.

There is an exhibit of “swollen” bones--actually bones enlarged and occasionally bowed by layering due to syphilis infection. Evidence of the deforming effects of rickets and even tuberculosis is on view.

Bronze and copper medical tools and a display of skulls reveal that a form of neurosurgery was common in pre-Columbian Peru. The smooth, rather than sharp, jagged edges of holes in skulls show that people lived long enough for the head wounds to heal, Tyson said.

Mummies also reveal their ancient secrets. One of the highlights of the exhibit is the “Lemon Grove Mummy,” found eight years ago in a Lemon Grove garage. CT scans, X-Rays, carbon-14 and other dating methods have revealed that the mummy from Chihuahua, Mexico, is 800 years old.

In addition to the Museum of Man’s collection of bones, other museums have loaned exhibits for this show. The Museum of Natural Antiquities in Stockholm, with underwriting from Scandinavian Airlines-SAS, flew over “the most famous skeleton in Sweden” as well as a curator to properly arrange its display.

The skeleton dates from about 1,250 A.D., and once was a pregnant woman. She was about 17 to 20 years old when she died, Tyson said, with a hereditary disease that caused small nobs of bone to grow all over her body.

The hereditary nature of the disease, known today as exostosis multiplex, is apparent because it can been seen on the tiny fetal bones of the woman’s baby that was still in her womb at her death.

“Mummies, Mayhem and Miseries,” continues through April along with a second display, “Baboons of Kenya: The Pumphouse Gang.”