A 2,500-year-old mummy is going to be "unwrapped" at the Massachusetts General Hospital for restoration and cleaning, the Dayton Daily News via The Associated Press reported.
Padihershef, the mummy, has been on display in the hospital since 1823. It was given to them as gift from the city of Boston.
The mummy was once a stonecutter in Thebes, now Luxor, which is located on the West side of the Nile River.
Padihershef is believed to have died at the age of 40. There's not much more known about him.
A conservator will take the mummy out of his coffin and clean salt deposits from his face with cotton swabs. The salt gradually came out of the mummies' skin over the years, which occurs during the mummification process.
Conservation experts also plan to work on the coffin, performing some basic stabilization repairs.
Padihershef will be put on display in a horizontal case that will be in the Ether Dome, which is where William T. G. Morton performed the first public surgery with anesthetic on Oct. 16, 1846.
In March the mummy was transported to the imaging section of the hospital on a patient stretcher. There he received a full-body X-ray and CT scan.
In the X-rays, researchers noticed a broom handle running from the base of Padihershef's head through his upper body.
It's believed the handle was used to stabilize the mummy's head, but it his unknown who is responsible for the repair, or when it took place.
The scans were meant to look at the bones, which had been shown in past tests to have interrupted growth lines. This may show that Padihershef had health issues.
"Plain films, or X-rays, give us some insight into the condition Padi's bones are in," Rajiv Gupta, MD, PhD, of MGH Imaging said. "They can be directly compared with earlier studies, done in 1931 and 1976, which reported interrupted growth lines indicative of a severe childhood illness that resulted in stunted body growth,"
"The CT scans give us more detailed information about bones as well as the soft tissues in the body," according to the Massachusetts General Hospital.
