Archive for the ‘Fova’ tag
A Modern Look at an Ancient Problem
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the lovely California Palace of the Legion of Honor. While I expected the art within to be stunning, I was also amazed at how beautiful the museum and its surroundings are. If you live nearby or are ever in the area, I would highly recommend a visit.
If you are making a visit before July 4, 2010, and have a scientific bent, you’ll have another reason to visit: an exhibit which the Legion of Honor has called “Very Postmortem: Mummies and Medicine” in honor of the return of Irethorrou, an Egyptian mummy over 2500 years old which had been on loan from the museum since 1944.
While anyone even remotely fascinated by the Ancient Egyptians will find the exhibit interesting, what I was most struck by was that a large part of the exhibit was dedicated to what could be found by using modern CT scans and X-rays on the mummies. These scans were able to probe not only what amulets/objects were encased with Irethorrou (and hence help out with the understanding of Ancient Egyptian culture), but they were even able to take a deeper medical look at Irethorrou’s organs, muscles, and bones – and all of this without requiring any direct handling of the mummies (and hence risking damage to them).
With this information, they were able to create a facial reconstruction of what Irethorrou might have actually looked like and even tell a short story of Irethorrou’s medical history! By partnering with with Fovia, a Palo Alto-based company specializing in high resolution volume rendering technology, the exhibit also portrays a rich three-dimensional high-def video “fly-by” of the CT scan’s findings.
The potential of using modern medical technology on “non-traditional” subjects is only beginning to be tapped. A recent Wall Street Journal article reports on a fascinating study which took CT scans of mummies from the National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, Egypt. They revealed, surprisingly, that some of the mummies (especially the older ones) showed the same artherosclerotic plaques which doctors see today in patients with heart disease, completely questioning the notion that such plaques were correlated with modernizing and the Western, sedentary, fast-food-intensive lifestyle. Or, as researcher Gregory Thomas puts it, "Not only do we have atherosclerosis now, it was prevalent as long as 3,500 years ago. It is part of the human condition."
What that finding could mean in terms of understanding the causes of cardiovascular disease is up to history to decide, but what shouldn’t be in question is the power of modern medical technology to shed light on the lives and health of ancient peoples.
California Palace of the Legion of Honor (link)
