A porcelain gallbladder was discovered among human remains

The preserved organ was discovered in a cemetery belonging to a mental institution. The University of Mississippi Medical Center's Asylum Hill Project

Upon the closure of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum in 1935, its cemetery was abruptly forgotten. The thousands of marked and unmarked graves there lay forgotten for decades as the vegetation turned into tangled overgrowth and the wooden grave markers deteriorated.

Eventually, the land was included in the University of Mississippi Medical Center's grounds. The institution launched the Asylum Hill Project in 2012 after discovering the graves again while doing construction on campus. The project's goals include learning more about the cemetery's past and honoring the deceased by researching, memorializing, and relocating them to a more fitting spot on campus. When the first 100 burials were being excavated, an unusual artifact was found among the remains of one person: a stony-beige colored object, roughly the size and shape of a quail egg (about two inches long and one inch wide), was sitting in the middle of the person's torso in the earth. For its size and shape, it was strangely light.

At first, nobody was able to identify it. Jennifer Mack, the principal bioarchaeologist at The University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Asylum Project, says, "Everyone just stood around and had theories." It was initially believed to be a calcified cyst by one person, but I reasoned that it was much too large to be a gallstone. Mack returned the item to her office. A retired surgeon from the team paid her a visit later. Mack remembers, "I said, 'Hey, we found something interesting.'" "He approached me and said, 'I believe that to be a calcified gallbladder,' while I was opening the bag. because he had previously seen them numerous times in his capacity as a surgeon.

Later on, the team determined that it was, in fact, a "porcelain gallbladder," or a perfectly preserved calcified gallbladder. The discovery was recently published in The International Journal of Osteoarchaeology by the team. It's the first porcelain gallbladder described as an archaeological discovery in a scholarly publication.

Parts or all of your gallbladder, which is an organ that stores bile produced by your liver and helps with digestion, can calcify and harden in a relatively uncommon and irreversible condition known as porcelain gallbladder. It gets its name from the fact that a calcified gallbladder in a living or recently deceased person takes on a whitish blue color, not because the organ turns ceramic. People with porcelain gallbladder can live with the condition and are frequently asymptomatic, so it is very possible that they are unaware that they have it. However, because having a porcelain gallbladder increases the risk of developing cancer, many people have it removed.

Although the exact cause and mechanism of a porcelain gallbladder are still unknown, researchers believe that chronic inflammation may start the calcification process. Curiously, according to Kurt Schaberg, an anatomic pathologist at the University of California, Davis, "it's not like we get porcelain esophagus" or "porcelain stomach," despite the fact that there are many other locations in the gastrointestinal tract and throughout the body where chronic inflammation can occur. "The gallbladder is renowned for turning porcelain, but we don't exactly know why."

Mack and her group are aware that the person who had the porcelain gallbladder was a middle-aged to elderly adult, but they don't know much more. Schaberg states, "An older woman would be the classic scenario of a porcelain gallbladder—statistically, that would make the most sense."

Normally, the gastrointestinal tract would rot and decay after death. Schaberg remarks, "It's kind of interesting that these calcifications have allowed a portion of the GI tract to survive."