Mysterious calcified ‘porcelain gallbladder’ found inside 100-year-old remains discovered in forgotten asylum cemetery

A mysterious “porcelain gallbladder” has been discovered within 100-year-old human remains inside a forgotten asylum cemetery.

About the size of a “quail egg,” the rare calcified gallbladder was deposited among thousands of marked and unmarked graves, untouched for decades.

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It is the first porcelain gallbladders – as they are commonly known – to be published in a academic journal as an archaeological find.

It was discovered as part of a project by the University of Mississippi Medical Center, which is now located in the cemetery after the asylum closed in 1935.

The team plans to research the history of the cemetery and move the deceased to a more suitable location on campus.

Atlas Obscura reported the archaeological oddity of being a “stoney-beige colored object, about the size and shape of a quail’s egg (about two inches long and two inches wide)… It was strangely light for its weight. shape and size”.

When discovered, the so-called “quail egg” was buried in the ground, right in the middle of this person’s torso.

“Everybody stood by and had theories,” Jennifer Mack, chief bioarchaeologist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Asylum Project, told Atlas.

“Someone thought it was a calcified cyst, someone else thought it was a gallstone and I thought, ‘that’s too big to be a gallstone’.”

A retired surgeon on the team told Mack it was a calcified gallbladder, which, although rare, he had seen before.

Mack recalled: “I said, ‘Hey, we found something interesting'”

“He came over and as I was opening the bag he said, ‘I think it’s a calcified gallbladder.’

“Because, as a surgeon, he had seen them on several occasions.”

Explainer: human calcification

Porcelain gallbladder is a rare and irreversible condition in which parts – or all – of the gallbladder calcify and harden.

It receives this name not because it actually becomes ceramic, but because the calcified organ takes on a whitish-blue color.

Calcifications can form in many places on the body, including:

• Small and large arteries.
• Heart valves.
• Brain, where it is known as cranial calcification.
• Joints and tendons, such as knee joints and rotator cuff tendons.
• Soft tissues such as breasts, muscles and fat.
• Kidney, bladder and gallbladder.

In March, an 81-year-old indigenous Brazilian woman died after doctors found an incredibly rare “stone baby” in her stomach, which she had been carrying for more than five decades.

Doctors discovered the calcified fetus, called lithopedium, which had been in her body for 56 years, with 3D imaging.

Daniela Almeida Vera, mother of seven, was rushed into surgery after the shocking discovery – one of less than 300 cases ever recorded – but sadly did not survive the procedure.

Researchers calculate that chronic inflammation can trigger the calcification process – but little is known about this mysterious condition.

The gallbladder should have already decomposed, but its calcification before the woman’s death preserved it for about a century.

“It’s interesting to see a portion of the gastrointestinal tract survive because of these calcifications,” said Kurt Schaberg, an anatomopathologist at the University of California, Davis.

“It’s not like we have a ‘porcelain esophagus’ or a ‘porcelain stomach’.

“We don’t know specifically why the gallbladder turns to porcelain, but it’s well known that it happens.”