In the crypt of the village church of Sankt Thomas Am Blasenstein, in northern Austria, rests from the 18th centurye century The mummified body of the vicar Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg. This church man died in 1746, at the age of 37. For a long time, his body was nicknamed “The priest dried in the open air”because we thought that his body had been preserved naturally. It was a mistake.
The British daily newspaper The Guardian reports that it is actually a mummy made using a very original embalming technique, consisting in using the rectal path of the deceased in order to fill it with a mixture of materials to absorb fluids inside its body. Thus, according to a study published on May 2 in the journal Frontiers of Medicinethe body of Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg would have been embalmed by filling his pelvic and abdominal cavities with a mixture of wood chips, twigs, fabrics (like hemp and silk) and zinc chloride.
Professor Andreas Nerlich, from Louis-et-Maximilien University in Munich, Germany, is the main author of the study. He recognizes that this discovery is very surprising, because there is no external evidence of the process. “The body wall was not open, the only possible entry was therefore the rectum”he specifies. He also underlines that this method is very different from the embalming methods known until then, in particular those of ancient Egypt.
In their study, Andreas Nerish and his colleagues also explain that the mummy had already been examined before, in particular using X -rays. However, this method had not made it possible to discover the strange “padding”. On the other hand, it had revealed a round structure inside the lower left intestine of the mummy, which had fueled the rumors according to which the individual would have died after swallowing a toxic capsule.
Determine the cause of death
It was during the renovation of the crypt in which the mummy finds that the Andreas Nerish team obtained authorization to analyze it again thanks to a partial autopsy and scanners. She was thus able to confirm that it was indeed the mummy of a man, probably aged 35 to 45, the dating to the radiocarbon of a skin sample suggesting that he had died between 1734 and 1780.
As for the “poisoned capsule”, the researchers discovered that it was a simple glass pearl similar to those used for rosaries. It could have been used to decorate the fabric used for the padding of the deceased. The research team added that the cause of the death of the vicar was probably a serious pulmonary hemorrhage due to tuberculosis, their body with signs of the disease.
However, the reason for the embalming of the Austrian vicar remains quite obscure. If scientists believe that this procedure aimed to avoid the propagation of miasmas infection, Andreas Nerish advances another possible explanation: the body could have been kept for its transport to its native Waldhausen monastery.
Also, the man of the church was perhaps not the only one to have benefited from such treatment. “This is the first documented case of this type of embalmingsays Andreas Nerish. We therefore ignore the frequency and place of this practice, but we assume that this type of “short -term conservation” has been used much more often than what one might think in view of this isolated case. ”
