Pathologising the Mummy’s Curse: Infection, Poison, and the Discovery of Tutankhamun

A lecture by Dr Eleanor Dobson to mark the centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

What first comes to mind when we think of the modern popular phenomenon that is the mummy’s curse are often images of the reanimated dead out for revenge, or ancient magical forces in pursuit of the excavators who have disturbed the mummy’s rest. Beyond supernatural tropes, however, the mummy’s curse also has roots in medicalised investigation, speculation, and imagination. Thus, when the tomb of Tutankhamun – discovered by a team of predominantly Egyptian excavators, led by Howard Carter and financed by the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon – was opened in November 1922 and Carnarvon died just a matter of months later in April 1923, theories of more mundane explanations for his illness and demise – poisons hidden in the tomb and diseases passed on to the excavators via the ‘foul air’ within – were as common as much as rumours of supernatural agency.

This talk explores the pathologisation of the mummy and the mummy’s curse, reading in a historical tradition stretching back to the early nineteenth century a popular intertwinement of the study of the preserved bodies of the ancient Egyptian dead with medical practices.

About the speaker:

Dr Eleanor Dobson is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (UCL Press, 2022) and Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).