Books in Brief

Mummies of the Pharaohs

Maurice Bucaille, M.D., transl. Alastair D. Pannell (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1990) 236 pp., $18.95.

Maurice Bucaille, a physician, has written an engrossing account of the medical research that has been conducted on the royal mummies now in the Cairo Museum. Included are a number of Bucaille’s own discoveries made during his investigation of the mummies of Ramesses II, when it was brought to Paris in 1976, and of Merenptah, in Cairo, from 1974 to 1976.

Much of Bucaille’s focus is upon the continuing deterioration suffered by the royal mummies, caused by their being unwrapped and then displayed in cases without temperature or humidity controls. This is highly laudable, especially as it has led museum authorities to undertake new conservation measures. Bucaille also excoriates Dr. Douglas Derry, a physician, and Egyptologist Howard Carter, for their dismemberment of Tutankhamun’s mummy in the mid-1920s and subsequent attempts to disguise the fact.