Learning secrets of the 'soap lady'

Leidy, a professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the College of Physicians, learned that some of the remains had changed to adipocere, a transformation that can affect the fatty portions of a cadaver in a cool, moist environment.

He "came to my house in quite an enthusiastic mood," said William Hunt, one of Leidy's colleagues, describing the doctor's visit in an 1896 article in the Public Ledger.

"They have been buried for nearly a hundred years, nobody claims them, and they would be rare and instructive additions to our collections" at the Mütter, Leidy said, according to Hunt's account.

Hunt said he and Leidy had spoken to the cemetery superintendent, who "put on airs, talked of violating graves . . ."

But before the pair left, Hunt said, the man "touched [Leidy] significantly on the elbow and said, 'I tell you what I do. I give the bodies up to the order of relatives.'

"The doctor took the hint, went home, hired a furniture wagon, and armed the driver with an order reading, 'Please deliver to the bearer the bodies of my grandfather and grandmother.' This brought the coveted prizes, and the virtuous caretaker was not forgotten."

The Mütter Museum says the bodies of a man and a woman were procured by Leidy for $7.50 each. The last name attributed to them was Ellenbogen - German for elbow - according to a 1942 report by Joseph McFarland, a pathologist and former curator of the museum.

The man's body later went into the collection of the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

In the Mütter Museum's collection of medical oddities, the soap lady remained perhaps the oddest and most intriguing of all. "And she is still a mystery," said Dhody.