Item #8006 Exhibiting for the benefit of the Massachusetts General Hospital, The Egyptian Mummy, Belonging to the Boston Medical College, Received from Thebes, through Mr. Lee, British Consul at Alexandria. Presented by Messrs. Van Lennep & Co., of Smyrna.
Exhibiting for the benefit of the Massachusetts General Hospital, The Egyptian Mummy, Belonging to the Boston Medical College, Received from Thebes, through Mr. Lee, British Consul at Alexandria. Presented by Messrs. Van Lennep & Co., of Smyrna.
Exhibiting for the benefit of the Massachusetts General Hospital, The Egyptian Mummy, Belonging to the Boston Medical College, Received from Thebes, through Mr. Lee, British Consul at Alexandria. Presented by Messrs. Van Lennep & Co., of Smyrna.

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Exhibiting for the benefit of the Massachusetts General Hospital, The Egyptian Mummy, Belonging to the Boston Medical College, Received from Thebes, through Mr. Lee, British Consul at Alexandria. Presented by Messrs. Van Lennep & Co., of Smyrna.

Printed by Wm. Grattan, 8, Thames-street, New York, [1823]. 8vo (6 x 9”), self wrappers. 4 pp., wood engraving by Alexander Anderson on cover page, signed “A” at lower right. CONDITION: Old folds, foxed, damp-stain throughout.

A scarce illustrated leaflet advertising the first complete mummy brought to America, which was exhibited to benefit the Massachusetts General Hospital and later toured the eastern seaboard, triggering the phenomenon known as “mummy-mania.”

This leaflet, made to accompany the mummy’s exhibition, bears a wood engraving of the sarcophagus exterior and contains a brief description of the mummy, the sarcophagus, and the practice of embalming, as well as a poetic “Address to the Mummy at Belzoni’s Exhibition,” attributed to “Campbell” (presumably Thomas Campbell), but actually by Horace Smith. The engraving is based on one of two engravings printed in a longer pamphlet, which is described here as containing “A more particular description of the Mummy and Sarcophagus…abridged in part from an elaborate pamphlet by Dr. J. C. Warren, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the Harvard University,” who was among the first to examine the specimen.

The mummy was sent to Boston by a Mr. Van Lennep, a merchant of Smyrna, and was presented to the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1823 as a fundraiser for the hospital and the Boston Dispensary. It was first installed “as an appropriate ornament of the operating room of the hospital” (Wolfe, p. 14), but was soon put on display at Mr. Doggett’s Repository of the Arts, on Market Street, where it was visited by over six hundred curious people within two days. By the fall of 1823, the mummy was sent on tour along the east coast, making its appearance in New York City at both the Academy of Arts and the Lyceum of Natural History (now the New York Academy of Sciences); Richmond, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; Philadelphia; Baltimore; and elsewhere. It was not until the 1960s that the hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus were deciphered and the mummy’s name, Padihershef, became known.

As the first complete mummy to tour America, Padihershef marked the beginning of American “mummy-mania,” a craze not only for the visual consumption of an increasing number of traveling mummies during the 1800s, but for public and private “unwrappings,” medicinal pills filled with “mummia,” or ground mummy remains, pigment (called “mummy brown” or “Egyptian brown”), and aromatics from the resins and gums, which “proved useful in making quantities of incense” for Catholic Church services, and more (Wolfe, p. 76). This was supplied not only by the looting of Egyptian tombs, but also by an increasing trade in fake mummies, which survive in collections throughout Europe and are themselves “a well-defined category” and an important “part of art history” (Oliva).

OCLC records just four copies of this leaflet, at Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library, the Peabody Essex Museum, the University of Rochester Medical Center, and the Huntington Library.

A scarce and attractive informational leaflet, printed in Boston for the first complete mummy to tour America.

REFERENCES: Olivia, Cinzia. “The Vatican Mummy Project and its Discoveries,” Inside the Vatican, 1 March 2015; Wolfe, S. J. Mummies in Nineteenth Century America: Ancient Egyptians as Artifacts (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009); Fearrington, Florence. Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599–1899 (New York: The Grolier Club, 2013).

Item #8006

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