page_title: Ether Dome
section_title: Mummy (the hospital's oldest patient)
hierarchical_section_title: Ether Dome / Features / Curated displays / Mummy (the hospital's oldest patient)
caption_attribution_description: English: Exhibit in the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 21 Edwards Street, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. This item is old enough so that it is in the public domain. The museum permitted photography without restriction.
context_page_description: The Ether Dome is a surgical operating amphitheater in the Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It served as the hospital's operating room from its opening in 1821 until 1867. It was the site of the first public demonstration of the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic on October 16, 1846, otherwise known as Ether Day. Crawford Long, a surgeon in Georgia, had previously administered sulfuric ether in 1842, but this went unpublished until 1849. The Ether Dome event occurred when William Thomas Green Morton, a local dentist, used ether to anesthetize Edward Gilbert Abbott. John Collins Warren, the first dean of Harvard Medical School, then painlessly removed part of a tumor from Abbott's neck. After Warren had finished, and Abbott regained consciousness, Warren asked the patient how he felt. Reportedly, Abbott said, "Feels as if my neck's been scratched". Warren then turned to his medical audience and uttered "Gentlemen, this is no Humbug". This was presumably a reference to the unsuccessful demonstration of nitrous oxide anesthesia by Horace Wells in the same theater the previous year, which was ended by cries of "Humbug!"
context_section_description: On May 4, 1823, Massachusetts General Hospital received an Egyptian mummy from the city of Boston, complete with painted wooden inner and outer coffins.  The ensemble had been given to the city by Jacob Van Lennep, a Dutch merchant living in the Greek city of Smyrna in the early 19th century. It is thought that Mr. Van Lennep, who was also the Counsel General of the Netherlands, bought the mummy as a gift to Boston as a way to impress his native New England in-laws.
  The mummy arrived in Boston on April 26, 1823, on the British ship the Sally Ann and was the first complete Egyptian burial ensemble in America. He was placed under the care of the ship's captain, Robert B. Edes, along with Bryant P. Tilden, Esq., who ultimately made the decision to give the mummy to Massachusetts General Hospital, whose trustees accepted the gift as "an appropriate ornament of the operating room," while also hoping to exhibit the mummy to raise funds for the hospital. The fledgling hospital, which had opened its doors just two years earlier, was still in need of operating funds that would help it better serve the sick and indigent individuals for whom it had been chartered to provide care. The mummy would help raise those needed funds.
  Shortly after his arrival, the mummy was put on display at "Mr. Doggett's Repository of Arts" in Boston, where hundreds of people paid $0.25 to see the first complete human Egyptian mummy in the U.S. That fall, the mummy went on a year-long (1823 to 1824) multi-city tour of the East Coast, raising even more money for the hospital. Upon his return, he was placed in the Ether Dome where he subsequently witnessed more than 6,000 surgeries, including the famous first successful demonstration of surgery under anesthesia on October 16, 1846.
  In 1823, John Collins Warren partially unwrapped and examined the mummy. He then published the first American treatise about mummies and mummification. The mummy spent much of the late 19th century at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The mummy's outer coffin has been at the George Walter Vincent Museum in Springfield, MA since 1932.
  More than a century later the hospital learned just who the mummy was. In 1960, Dows Dunham, curator emeritus of the Department of Egyptian Art at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, examined and translated the hieroglyphics on the mummy's coffin. Hailing from the 26th Dynasty (663–525 BC) or later, the mummy now had a name—Padihershef, meaning "He whom the god Hershef has given." and a birthplace—Thebes; and an occupation—stonecutter. Newer medical information tells us that Padihershef, or "Padi", was probably between 20 and 30 years of age and was not a stonecutter at all. Rather, he was "tomb finder," or prospector, someone who looked for spaces in the Theban necropolis that could serve as burial spaces.
  Padihershef's remains have been studied by means of x-rays and CT scans. In 2013, a donor provided funds for the mummy's restoration. During the procedure, Padihershef was given a full-body CT scan overseen by Massachusetts General Hospital's radiologist Rajiv Gupta. This scan, which provided more than 20,000 scans that were then assembled into 3D renderings of his body. Many of these are replicated in the report prepared by forensic pathologist Jonathan Elias, PhD, of AMSC Research, a mummy research consortium.
  One of the outcomes of the project includes a CT facial reconstruction of Padihershef. Using the scans, 3D facial recognition software and a thorough knowledge of mummy forensics, Elias' group undertook a thorough analysis based on all these factors and using a 3D skull model, developed a representation of what Padi may have looked like in life.
  The mummy Padishershef has borne witness to many medical milestones during his 190 years in the Massachusetts General Hospital's Ether Dome. Over the decades, visitors to the room have been greeted silently by this unusual host, standing nestled in his beautifully decorated coffin, and often wondered just who he was and how he came to reside at the hospital.
  Until this most recent examination, little was 
caption: Outer Coffin of Padihershef
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "SONY", "Image Model": "DSC-H55", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Picasa", "Image DateTime": "2013:03:26 05:09:07", "Image Artist": "Picasa", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "282", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 51, 48, 48, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "10926", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6046", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/15", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2012:12:19 12:48:20", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2012:12:19 12:48:20", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "29/8", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "17/4", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4320", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3240", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "4320", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "3240", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "10778", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "a3b2b559a83ff37a45b38fbf579e7990"}