They carefully removed her coffinlike Plexiglas case and positioned the equipment a few inches from the woman, who got her name after being exhumed in Old City in 1875 in a kind of mummified state. Her flesh had been transformed through a rare chemical reaction into a soapy substance called adipocere (prounounced AD-i-poe-SERE).
"She's getting a physical," Mütter curator Anna Dhody said, standing near a wall of skulls and medical oddities. "It may be too late for her, but it's not too late for us to learn more about her."
The experts took Polaroid X-rays of the soap lady and laid out the images - 60 seconds later - on the floor to create a life-size mosaic of her skeleton.
Then they took industrial digital X-rays to be developed later. Dhody removed three strands of hair for toxicology tests that could reveal whether the woman had arsenic or lead in her system.
This summer, coring devices will take plugs of tissue from her liver and a kidney.
"We're using archaeo-forensics - applying modern forensic techniques to a historical mystery," Dhody said.
So far, researchers know the soap lady was a short, stout woman with a healthy skeleton. She probably suffered from a painful kidney stone or gallstone.
But more X-rays and tests are required "before a theory can be formed about the cause of death," Dhody said. "This was an evidence-gathering day."
Younger than she looked
Modern technology has already disproved some long-held beliefs about the soap lady.
Records at the Mütter, part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, originally described her as a "fat woman" named Ellenbogen who died of yellow fever in 1792.
"We have some fiber-optic lighting in her case, and the running joke is: The good news is you can see her a lot better, and the bad news you can see her a lot better," Dhody said. "She's not a Bo Derek '10.' "
