Autopsy on the mummy of "Fin-Renard", Bourges (France)

Abstract

Discovered in 1908 in a lead coffin conserved in a stone sarcophagus, the mummy of the “Fin-Renard” from Bourges, central France, was immediately identified as that of a gallo-roman child. The circumstances of his death as the extraordinary conservation of his body were the object of many conclusions related to contemporaneous medicohistorical knowledge and limited by partial investigation potentiality. The preparation of the exhibition Maternité et petite enfance dans l’Antiquité Romaine” (“Maternity and childhood in Roman Antiquity”) presented at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle at Bourges in 2003/2004 necessitated the reexamination of the body. The application of the most actual paleopathological methods and techniques permitted a more precise observation of this unique but surprising French specimen. However, after many radiographic, scannographic, fibroscopic and microscopic studies, the little mummy conserves many of its mysteries