With the Mutter Museum continuing their exploration of how to best and most ethically manage their collection of body parts, I thought a look at one of their more famous displays was in order.

Where she came from

“The Soap Lady” was exhumed in Philadelphia in 1875. Her name comes from the adipocere (a fatty, soap-like substance) that formed in her corpse due to the alkaline, warm, and airless environment she was buried in.

Dr. Joseph Leidy, the father of American vertebrate paleontology, donated the specimen to the Mutter Museum. He said that he procured the corpse from a graveyard at 4th and Race. It was common in the late 19th century for churches to sell their burial lands and move the graves elsewhere. He reported that the name on the grave was “Ellenbogen” and that they had died of yellow fever in 1792.

Surprise!

Dr. Leidy’s story, however, does hold up under scrutiny. Sixty-five years later, Joseph McFarland, then curator of the Mutter, investigated the story and found that:

There had never been a graveyard at 4th and Race streets.

There is no record of anyone by the name of Ellenbogen dying of yellow fever in 1792.

The museum took an X-ray of the Soap Lady in 1986. They found that her buttons and pins were not manufactured in the United States until the 1830s.

Upon further investigation, McFarland found a receipt for $7.50 for “expenses in the procural of an adipocere body.”

After Dr. Leidy’s death, a member of the Museum Committee named Dr. William Hunt shared his memory of how the Soap Lady came to be.

Dr. Leidy saw grave diggers exhuming the adipocere body and thought it would be a good addition to the Mutter’s collection. He went down to the graveyard and pretended to be a relative of the corpse to retrieve the specimen. 

Sins of the past

The Soap Lady is just one story in a series of stories of questionable actions taken by physicians before they were given the ability to study the human body via autopsy. Research continues at the Mutter to determine the true identity and story of the Soap Lady.