Rare 'porcelain gallbladder' found in 100-year-old unmarked grave at Mississippi mental asylum cemetery

About 100 years ago, a woman at Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum died with a condition so rare, it puzzled modern-day archaeologists who were excavating the asylum's unmarked graves. 

But soon, thanks to help from their medical collaborators, the team determined the hard egg-shaped object in the skeletal remains of the woman's torso was a "porcelain gallbladder" — a condition never before found in an archaeological skeleton.

In a study published March 30 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, researchers detailed the rare discovery of a gallbladder that had been preserved for a century. While organs normally decay completely over time after a person's death, in this case, the gallbladder had calcified, a process in which calcium builds up in the muscular wall of the organ, causing it to harden.

The preserved organ, often called a porcelain gallbladder in the medical literature, was associated with the skeleton of a middle-aged woman who was buried in the asylum's cemetery. Founded in 1855 and closed in 1935, the asylum treated tens of thousands of patients, around 7,000 of whom died while in residence and were buried in simple pine boxes with wooden markers. 

The cemetery was rediscovered in 2012 during development of the land, which is now on the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Exhumations by the Asylum Hill Project began in 2022, led by UMMC bioarchaeologist Jennifer Mack.

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"Gallbladder disease is fairly common in modern American populations, though rates have increased in the last few decades," Mack told Live Science in an email. But although tiny gallstones have occasionally been found in archaeological contexts, this is the first reported discovery of a porcelain gallbladder in a cemetery burial.