What to do with a mummy

Bryant P. Tilden and Robert B. Edes addressed the following letter to Doctors Warren, Jackson, and Gorham, dated 26 April 1823 and recorded in the Boston Daily Advertiser of 3 May, 1823:

"Gentlemen: There is now on board  the ship Sally Anne, lately arrived from Smyrna, a mummy, sent under the care of Capt. R.B. Edes, to him and myself, to be disposed of as we may think proper, for certain purposes; and as they are of a benevolent nature, and the learned may be gratified in examining the cases, hieroglyphics, &c. &c. we request that it may first be placed under your charge, at the Medical College.

The gentleman who sent it, is Mr. Jacob Van Lennep, to be presented in the name of his commercial house at Smyrna, Messers. Jacob Van Lennep & Co who thus writes upon the subject:

'We have shipped on board the Sally Anne, under the denomination of GUM, a large case, containing a mummy. The British Consul at Alexandria writes me as follows on the subject:

I have procured you a mummy, a capital one:--as no good ones, opened, were to be found at Cairo or this places, I commissioned a person going to Thebes to select me one, and I am glad he succeeded in procuring you the best that has been seen for a long time. ... The following plan for appropriating the proceeds which may arise from exhibiting the mummy, is in our opinion a good one—and we trust that the soul, which probably some thousand years past inhabited it, will fully approve of our making use of the same for so benevolent a purpose.

It is to give it to the General Hospital, and let every person who wishes have an opportunity to see the same, paying the moderate sum of twenty five cents each. The first two hundred dollars that may arise form the receipts, we wish should be paid over to the Boston Dispensary; and all the proceeds afterwards be retained by the hospital, to be given, as the government thereof may see proper, to such poor persons as are destitute or distressed, on leaving this institution, after sickness and confinement.'"

Thus the mummy and the plan were accepted and put into action.

 The 6 May 1823 issue of the Salem Gazette published the following reply from the doctors at the Medical College:

"Gentlemen—in compliance with your request, we have received and examined the mummy now in our care at the Medical College, which was sent to you by Mr. Van Lennep, and find it to be in perfect good order. The proposed distribution of the receipts arising from the exhibition, appears to us very judicious, and well calculated to accomplish the liberal intentions of the gentleman who presented it. Yours &c. James Jackson, John C. Warren, John Gorham."

John Collins Warren, in his capacity as a surgeon on the Board of the Massachusetts Hospital,  was to have an intimate association with Padihershef almost from the moment of the mummy’s arrival in Boston.  He wrote in an article, “Description of an Egyptian Mummy, Presented to the Massachusetts General Hospital  With an Account of the Operation of Embalming, in Ancient and Modern Times,” in the 1823 issue of Boston Journal of Philosophy and the Arts:

"The trustees of the Hospital, having received the donation, desired me to give a description of it for the general public. The freshness and fine state of preservation of every part, led some persons to suggest it might be one of those fabricated mummies, of which we have heard. These suspicions induced me to examine every thing belonging to it with great care, that I might be able, if it proved genuine, to do justice to the gentlemen who presented it, and to afford the Hospital the fair benefit of its exhibition."

Warren's examinations proved the mummy was real and genuine, and preparations were made to exhibit it.