Denver Day 6

(Proceed with caution if you have a weak stomach).

Today is only free day Lance had with no labs or classes. We purchased tickets to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science where the main exhibit we were interested in was Body Worlds. We weren't allowed to take pictures unfortunately but take our word it, it was worth every penny! In short, this German mortician embalms with a process called plastination which preserves bodies indefinitely. He then takes the bodies and dissects them to show specific muscle structure or the like. He also show cases other particular things like the whole nervous system or the digestive system or the arteries in a head, etc. It's so fascinating and I highly recommend it to every one!
Our tickets also included admittance to the rest of the museum so we went to the Egyptian mummies exhibit. They talked about the god of embalming, Anubis, and what they believed regarding the afterlife. There were two mummies on display that were purchased by a wealthy Colorado man in 1904. These mummies were from 1000 b.c. and show two different women, one of a mummy of a wealthy woman and another that of a poor woman, showing the differences between mummification, etc. One of the neatest things is that a doctor from the 90's wanted to know the condition of the mummies inside the linen wrappings. He took them from the museum to a university hospital where they did CT scans. Unbelieveable! It shows how well preserved the rich woman was and how many amulets she had within the wrappings (porcelain good luck charms), and gold foil over the embalmers incision. The poor woman CT scan showed her brain still intact, several broken bones, no amulets, and very few linen wrappings. It was so interesting and intriguing, we loved it!

This is the mummification of a poor woman.

In all it was the icing on the cake at the close of a week of mortuary labs for Lance!