Exhibitions 
 
 The Soap Lady 
 
 The Soap Lady is the name given to a woman whose body was exhumed in Philadelphia in 1875. The specimen is unique because a fatty substance called adipocere encases the remains. Adipocere formation is not common, but it may form in alkaline, warm, airless environments, such as the one in which the Soap Lady was buried. 
 
 The first X-rays taken of the Soap Lady in 1986 revealed buttons and pins on her clothing that that were not manufactured in the United States until the 1830s. 
 
 Dr. Joseph Leidy, known as the father of American vertebrate paleontology, procured the body of the Soap Lady after she was exhumed at a Philadelphia cemetery. He originally reported that she died in the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of the 1790s. Based on her lack of teeth, Leidy assumed that she had died in middle or old age. 
 
 The first X-rays taken of the Soap Lady in 1987 revealed buttons and pins on her clothing that that were not manufactured in the United States until the 1830s. Leidy was wrong about her year of death. 
 
 A radiology team from Quinnipiac University led by Jerry Conlogue and Ron Beckett made a new set of digital and print X-rays in 2007. These images have allowed us to revise the Soap Lady’s age at death from about 40 to significantly younger, perhaps in her late 20s. ||||| FILE – This July 12, 1999, file photo shows a portion of the two floors of the Mutter Museum, a medical museum in Philadelphia. Australian politician Lynda Voltz is pushing for the Mutter Museum to return... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE – This July 12, 1999, file photo shows a portion of the two floors of the Mutter Museum, a medical museum in Philadelphia. Australian politician Lynda Voltz is pushing for the Mutter Museum to return the skull of an unknown Australian soldier shot and killed in World War I, and the museum said... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE – This July 12, 1999, file photo shows a portion of the two floors of the Mutter Museum, a medical museum in Philadelphia. Australian politician Lynda Voltz is pushing for the Mutter Museum to return the skull of an unknown Australian soldier shot and killed in World War I, and the museum said... (Associated Press) FILE – This July 12, 1999, file photo shows a portion of the two floors of the Mutter Museum, a medical museum in Philadelphia. Australian politician Lynda Voltz is pushing for the Mutter Museum to return... (Associated Press) 
 
 PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A Philadelphia medical museum said Tuesday it will return the skull of an Australian soldier who was killed in World War I to the Australian Army. 
 
 A military attache for the Australian Embassy will meet with Mutter Museum officials in the coming weeks to take the skull, the museum said in a statement. 
 
 "We can appreciate the position of, and are sympathetic to, the mission of the Australian Army," said Robert Hicks, the museum's director. "The recovery of remains of soldiers who were lost in combat or died as prisoners of war is vital work." 
 
 The remains are those of 27-year-old Pvt. Thomas Hurdis, of New South Wales, according to a statement from Brig. Shane Gabriel, the military attache. 
 
 The announcement came on 100th anniversary of the soldier's death. 
 
 Hurdis was wounded at the Battle of Polygon Wood, near Ypres, Belgium, on Sept. 28, 1917. His injuries included a bullet that is lodged and still visible near the left eye socket. 
 
 He was treated by a Philadelphia ophthalmologist in France. Five days after he was wounded, a disoriented Hurdis pulled off his bandages and bled to death. 
 
 Australian politician Linda Voltz has been pushing for the skull's return. 
 
 "Many families never knew the fate of their sons. The fact this soldier's remains were sitting in a museum after such a horrific death, where the head has obviously been separated from the body, is appalling," she said in emailed comments over the weekend. She didn't immediately return a message seeking comment about Tuesday's announcement. 
 
 The skull was given to the museum in 1919 by the British government, supervised by the British Medical Services, the museum said. It was part of a collection intended for study by military doctors conducting reconstructive surgery on soldiers. The museum said it hadn't been displayed in years. 
 
 The museum said it was contacted by the Australian Army in August about the skull. The controversy was first reported last week by The Guardian newspaper. 
 
 The Mutter is known for its collection of organs preserved in jars, deformed skeletons and lifelike wax casts of shocking medical maladies. It was founded in 1863 by The College of Physicians, which still operates it. 
 
 The stated mission of the museum is to help the public "understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and to appreciate the history of diagnosis and treatment of disease." 
 
 Exhibits include an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) human colon, the body of a woman who essentially turned to soap, slides of Albert Einstein's brain and a tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland. 
 
 ___ 
 
 This story has been corrected to show the announcement came on the 100th anniversary of the soldier's death, not days before the anniversary. ||||| Australia likes to refer to its battlefield dead, especially in the first and second world wars, as “the fallen” whose bodies, if found, were “laid to rest” in picturesque, peaceful cemeteries of blonde statuary and rosemary bush. 
 
 Our politicians invest significantly in commemorating them (some $600m-plus alone for first world war centenary events), and into finding, identifying and reburying those whose bodies the mud may surrender many decades later. 
 
 Making war illegal changed the world. But it’s becoming too easy to break the law Read more 
 
 So it is surprising to find the skull of a first world war Australian Anzac soldier, replete with the shocking facial injuries that killed him a century ago this week, featured online in an American medical museum’s grisly collection of sometimes freakish exhibits. 
 
 The skull, part of the collection of the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, tells a shocking and tragic story of battlefield violence and intolerable physical suffering that official commemoration – with its almost ecclesiastical language of the fighting Anzac “spirit, the “fallen” and their “sacrifice” – all too often overlooks. 
 
 On 28 September 1917, the Anzac was shot in the mouth during the Battle of Polygon Wood (known also as the Third Ypres, part of the Battle of Passchendaele) in Belgium, and his right jaw destroyed by shrapnel while another bullet – still visible in his skull – struck his left sinus. 
 
 The museum’s explainer reads: 
 
 This Australian soldier’s skull has extensive damage caused by bullet wounds sustained in the Battle of Passchendale (or Third Ypres, Battle of Polygon Wood) in the First World War. He was shot on September 28, 1917. Most of the damage was caused by a lead bullet that entered the mouth and passed through the palate and right eye. Shrapnel destroyed the ascending ramus of the right jaw, and another bullet, visible here, struck the left frontal sinus. Philadelphia opthalmologist and surgeon WT Shoemaker treated this soldier at a battlefield hospital in France. This soldier survived his initial injuries and treatments. But, five days after his injuries, blind and disoriented, he pulled out the bandage materials in his mouth that packed the wounds. He bled to death. 
 
 It says Shoemaker donated the “Adult skull with ballistic trauma” to the museum in 1917, making possible an inference, of course, that the opthalmologist removed the head from the battlefield hospital. It’s hard to imagine what, if any, consent was involved. 
 
 Click on the icon reading “OUCH” and the illustration highlights the shrapnel damage to the soldier’s jaw, or, on the one reading “THE END”, to see a close up of the hole in his cheek that had been packed with bandage. “Pulling out the material that packed this space is what killed our soldier,” it explains. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Mutter Museum 
 
 The Anzac skull certainly tells a story of a terrible battlefield death. But as is so often the way when human remains become institutional collection items, it is stripped of human identity and past beyond the moments of injury and death. It is objectified by death, not what life – rich and interesting or otherwise – preceded it. 
 
 And, so, unfortunately, we know precious little about who this Anzac is. We don’t have his name or know who his family is or where he came from. Was he Indigenous or white? Even had he contemplated dying in war (what soldier who volunteers to go off and fight does not?) could he ever have imagined that his head would become a museum collection item and an object of popular curiosity? 
 
 If the Mütter Museum knows any of this, it is not letting on. 
 
 Despite my repeated requests, the museum has not detailed how: it acquired the Australian’s head; whether the rest of his body is in the museum or buried in a war cemetery; if the museum is privy to the dead man’s identity and whether the skull has been on temporary or permanent public display. 
 
 It is, in fact, likely that the rest of the body is buried at either Polygon Wood Cemetery or the nearby Buttes New British Cemetery. In the past decade the bodies of several Anzacs who died in fighting around Polygon Wood have been unearthed on local properties. Several have been identified using DNA techniques. All have been officially re-buried with either “known unto God” headstones or memorials bearing their re-established identities. 
 
 It is understood that the Australian Army’s office of Unrecovered War Casualties – which is mandated with recovering and identifying unaccounted for military personnel, is aware of the Mütter Museum’s Anzac skull and is making inquiries, possibly through the Australian Embassy in Washington. 
 
 Mütter describes itself as “America’s finest museum of medical history” which “displays its beautifully preserved collections of anatomical specimens, models, and medical instruments in a 19th-century ‘cabinet museum’ setting. The museum helps the public understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and to appreciate the history of diagnosis and treatment of disease”. 
 
 The Anzac skull is part of a collection that also includes “the soap lady” (a body exhumed in Philadelphia in 1875), Albert Einstein’s brain, Dr Joseph Hyrtl’s human skull collection, a plaster cast and the conjoined liver of “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng Bunker, the jaw tumour of President Grover Cleveland, and hundreds of body parts that illustrate disease and terrible war injuries. 
 
 The fourth and fifth divisions of the Australian Imperial Force suffered more than 5,700 casualties at the Battle of Polygon Wood, which began on 26 September 1917. It was the most devastating year of the war for the AIF; 12,000 Australians died in the extended battle of Passchendaele alone and 30,000, mostly on the western front, for the year. 
 
 From a population of less than 5 million in 1914, some 324,000 Australians enlisted and served overseas, and 61,720 died. Most are buried in official war graves close to the battlefields or field hospitals where they died. But tragically some 18,000 who died on the European western front were either never found or could not be identified at death. 
 
 The Anzac whose skull is displayed by Mütter would be ranked with the missing even though the museum might well be in a position to help name him due to the medical and personnel records that would have formed part of his battlefield treatment. 
 
 Australia's Anzac carnival of commemoration leaves some things not talked about Read more 
 
 Meanwhile, the display of the skull is anomalous with official Australian policies to remove from public display and repatriate human remains (overwhelmingly belonging to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestors) that are held by foreign collecting institutions – mostly museums and medical schools. 
 
 The National Museum of Australia has the remains of about 500 individuals that it has repatriated to Australia from foreign institutions but, for various reasons mostly to do with unestablished identity, has been unable to return to country. 
 
 The South Australian Museum, which has the largest collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material culture in the world, holds the remains of several thousand Indigenous people. 
 
 The government has dedicated minimal resources and energy to the identification and repatriation of Indigenous remains, however. As Australia prepares to commemorate the AIF’s actions at Passchendaele and Polygon Wood this week, the official response to the Mütter Anzac skull display will, therefore, be most illuminating. ||||| "I'm really pleased to hear that, on the centenary of his death, Australian authorities have confirmed that the skull is that of Thomas Hurdis and that the museum is to return it," said John Hartley, a military historian and member of the forum. "The right thing has been done here and we can look forward to Thomas' skull being buried, along with the rest of his remains, at the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Le Treport, France. I hope to pay my respects to this brave man during a battlefields trip next spring." ||||| Return of remains of Thomas Hurdis, who died a century ago, comes after outcry over grisly display 
 
 An American medical museum has agreed to hand over to Australian authorities for burial the skull of a world war one Anzac servicemen who died of horrendous facial wounds a century ago. 
 
 The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia confirmed in a statement it would hand over the skull, which has been independently established to be that of Private Thomas Hurdis of the 59th Battalion Australian Imperial Force who died on 3 October 1917. 
 
 Controversy over the skull erupted last month after the Guardian reported it was on display at the museum, complete with a grisly description of the wounds that had killed Private Hurdis. 
 
 The Anzac skull that tells a shocking and tragic story of battlefield violence | Paul Daley Read more 
 
 In the statement Mütter said the Australian army first contacted it about the skull in August. This is when the Guardian first approached the museum with questions about the provenance – and human identity – of the skull. 
 
 The museum removed the skull from display last week after the military attache at the Australian embassy in Washington contacted the institution stressing the need to repatriate the remains of missing soldiers. 
 
 In a letter to the museum, the attache wrote: “The repatriation and interment of Private Hurdis’ skull is consistent with our ongoing efforts to recover, identify and formally inter human remains of our fallen from all conflicts, notwithstanding our affirmative recognition that the accession, stewardship and use of the skull is entirely consistent with the applicable laws and protocols.” 
 
 The museum said in its statement that the skull “was given to the museum in 1919 by the British government, supervised by the British Medical Services. The skull was given as part of a collection intended for study by military doctors conducting reconstructive surgery on soldiers”. 
 
 However, in an explainer about the skull, since removed from the museum’s website, Mütter had said the skull was donated in 1917 by Philadelphia ophthalmologist WT Shoemaker who treated Hurdis’s wounds at an American military hospital in France. 
 
 The explainer read: “This Australian soldier’s skull has extensive damage caused by bullet wounds sustained in the Battle of Passchendaele (or Third Ypres, Battle of Polygon Wood) in the first world war. He was shot on 28 September 1917. Most of the damage was caused by a lead bullet that entered the mouth and passed through the palate and right eye. Shrapnel destroyed the ascending ramus of the right jaw, and another bullet, visible here, struck the left frontal sinus. 
 
 “Philadelphia ophthalmologist and surgeon WT Shoemaker treated this soldier at a battlefield hospital in France. This soldier survived his initial injuries and treatments. But, five days after his injuries, blind and disoriented, he pulled out the bandage materials in his mouth that packed the wounds. He bled to death.” 
 
 The rest of Hurdis’s remains are buried at Mont Huon military cemetery in Le Tréport, France, where his skull will soon be buried too. 
 
 The Mütter director, Robert Hicks, said: “We can appreciate the position of, and are sympathetic to, the mission of the Australian army. The recovery of remains of soldiers who were lost in combat or died as prisoners of war is vital work. 
 
 “The Mütter Museum observes a high standard of care and respect regarding human remains, and our observances of relevant laws and protocols is consistent with best practice in United States museums.” 
 
 US museum under fire over display of skull of Australian soldier Read more 
 
 Private Hurdis’s brother John, also an AIF soldier, went missing in the Battle of Fromelles in 1916. It is possible DNA from the skull could be used to identify his body if it is among more than 100 that have been found in mass graves but cannot be personally identified. 
 
 The American and British armies have a long-established practice of allowing the collection of human medical samples without permission from the relevant soldiers or their families for medical education purposes providing the individuals from whom they were taken were not identified. 
 
 Through a simple triangulation of Australian military records, however, it was possible to easily identify the skull in the Mütter collection as being that of Private Thomas Hurdis, who lived in Sydney’s inner west before he volunteered to fight.
– Private Thomas Hurdis' death in October 1917 was a grisly one. The Australian soldier was shot in the face with lead bullets during the Battle of Passchendaele in France, blinding the 27-year-old and destroying parts of his jaw and sinuses. Philadelphia ophthalmologist WT Shoemaker tended to the soldier, who bled to death five days after sustaining the injuries after he tore out the bandages that were packed into his cheek. His body was interred in a military cemetery in Le Tréport, France; his skull wasn't, until now. The Guardian reports the skull had for nearly a century been in the possession of the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which says the British government donated it two years after Hurdis' death "for study by military doctors conducting reconstructive surgery on soldiers." While Australia acknowledged the museum obtained the skull in a manner "entirely consistent with the applicable laws and protocols," it requested that it be repatriated, and the museum announced Tuesday it will oblige. Philly.com reports US and British armies have permitted skulls of dead soldiers to be used for medical education so long as the soldier wasn't identified. But once the Guardian in late September raised the question of the soldier's identity, a British military forum used details regarding the location, timing, and position of the soldier's wounds to conclude the skull likely belonged to Hurdis. The AP reports the museum was founded in 1863 and displays such oddities as the body of a woman "who essentially turned to soap" and a tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland. (The remains of 23 WWI soldiers may be slumbering here.)