BUDAPEST, Hungary — Resting in cardboard boxes in long rows of cabinets on the top floor of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, 265 mummies are helping scientists find new ways to treat tuberculosis.
Buried between 1731 and 1838 in the crypt of a Dominican church in the northern Hungarian town of Vac, the naturally preserved mummies were forgotten for decades and discovered in 1994 during the church’s renovation. The mummification process happened thanks to the favorable microclimate inside the crypt, including low temperatures and relatively constant humidity and air pressure.
“What was probably the most exciting and most comprehensive study was the one about tuberculosis,” said Ildiko Pap, head of the Department of Anthropology of the Hungarian Natural History Museum. “In some of the individuals, the traces of the mutations on the bones caused by tuberculosis are evident to the naked eye.”
Eighty-nine percent of the mummies, ranging in age from newborns to over 65, had at one point been infected with tuberculosis, and around 35 percent were suffering from the disease at the time of death. The strains of tuberculosis found in the mummies offer a unique chance to study the pathogens from a time before the development of antibiotics and prior to the spread of the Industrial Revolution.
