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They don’t move, they don’t complain, and they’re impervious to X-ray damage. In other words, mummies are “a perfect subject for medical radiography,” according to conservator JP Brown of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
Scientists figured this out early on: just months after Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays in the fall of 1895, a physicist, Walter Koenig, captured the first radiographic images of mummified remains at the Physical Society of Frankfurt-am-Main. Up until that point, studying mummies had mostly meant unwrapping them, a process that Brown notes is “necessarily destructive.” A few decades later, the Field Museum became a pioneer of mummy imaging. Edward Jerman of the Victor X-Ray Corporation of Chicago volunteered his services and radiographed 32 ancient Egyptian and Peruvian mummies in the museum’s collection with what curator Berthold Lauer called “such gratifying and convincing results” that museum president Stanley Field opened a ...
