2024-09-17
28 分钟Rosalie David is a pioneer in the study of ancient Egypt. In the early 1970s, she launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using the techniques of modern medicine. Back then, the vast majority of Egyptologists regarded mummies as unimportant sources of information about life in ancient Egypt. Instead they focussed on interpreting hieroglyphic inscriptions, the written record in papyrus documents and archaeological remains and artefacts. Rosalie David proved that the traditionalists were quite wrong. Professor David’s mummy research started at the Manchester Museum when she began to collaborate with radiologists at the nearby Manchester Royal Infirmary, taking the museum’s mummies for x-rays at the hospital. Her multi-disciplinary team later moved to a dedicated institute at the University of Manchester, the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology. Over the decades, the team there has made remarkable discoveries about disease and medicine in ancient Egyptian society, providing a new perspective on the history of medicine and giving extraordinary insights into the lives of individuals all those years ago. Rosalie tells Jim Al-Khalili about her journey from classics and ancient history to biomedicine, including some of her adventures in Egypt in the 1960s. She talks about some of her most significant research projects, and the 21st Century forensic detective work on the mummy of a young woman which revealed a gruesome murder 3,000 years ago... Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast edition of the Life Scientific.
I'm Jamal Khalili and this is the show where I get to talk with some of the world's leading scientists and you get to find out what drives them.
So sit back, get comfortable and enjoy the episode.
Think of ancient Egypt and you probably picture the pyramids or the Sphinx or hieroglyphics or mummies.
Well, today we will be focused very much on mummies because my guest is Rosalie David, the UK's first female professor of Egyptology.
Half a century ago, as a young Egyptologist in Manchester, Rosalie launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using the techniques of modern medicine, something no other Egyptologist was doing back then.
Rosalie's mummy research started at the Manchester Museum and later moved to a dedicated University of Manchester institute, the KN center for Biomedical Egyptology.
Over the decades, her team have made remarkable discoveries about disease and medicine in ancient Egyptian society, providing a new perspective on the history of medicine and giving extraordinary insights into the lives of individuals all those years ago.
Rosalie David, welcome to the Life Scientific.
Hello.
Now, Rosalie, I know that when you started your research on mummies back in the early 70s, you and your collaborators had a particular approach in mind, something called the Manchester Method.
What is it?
Yes, the Manchester Method is a way of combining historical and archaeological evidence with bioscience and bringing them together so that you can gain from all the different aspects and then learn a great deal about the individual's life and indeed their death.
It brought together Egyptology, which is art, archaeology, history, and then a whole range of biosciences, from radiology right the way through to the most recent, which is proteomics.
It was also a way of keeping a team together because there had been investigations of mummies elsewhere, but they then stopped when the mummy was investigated, whereas we continued, of course, over the decades.
Can you first give me an idea of the range of diseases you can discover in Egyptian mummies?
You know, maybe a case history?
Yes.
There was one mummy in the Manchester Museum.