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

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

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

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It’s the first porcelain gallbladder – as they are commonly known – to be published in an academic journal as an archaeological finding.

It was uncovered as part of a University of Mississippi Medical Centre   project, which is now located on the cemetery grounds after the asylum closed in 1935.

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

Atlas Obscura reported the archaeological oddity yo be a “stony-beige colored object, about the size and shape of a quail egg (about two inches long and one inch wide)… It was oddly light for its shape and size.”

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

“Everyone just stood around and had theories,” Jennifer Mack, the lead 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 way too big to be a gallstone.’”

A retired surgeon on the team told Mack that it was a calcified gallbladder which, while 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 that’s a calcified gallbladder.’

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

Explainer: Human calcification

A porcelain gallbladder is a rare and irreversible condition where parts – or all – of your gallbladder calcifies and hardens. 

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

Calcifications can form in many places throughout your body, including:

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

In March, an indigenous Brazilian woman, 81, died after doctors found an incredibly rare “stone baby” in her stomach that she had been carrying for over five decades.

Doctors uncovered the calcified foetus, called a lithopedion, which had been in her body for 56 years, with 3D scans.

Mum-of-seven Daniela Almeida Vera was rushed to surgery after the shocking discovery – one of less than 300 cases ever recorded – but she unfortunately didn’t survive the procedure.

Researchers reckon chronic inflammation might trigger the calcification process – but little is understood about the mysterious condition.

The gallbladder should have decomposed by now, but the calcification of it prior to the woman’s death has preserved it for roughly a century.

“It’s kind of interesting to see a part of the GI tract survive due to these calcifications,” Kurt Schaberg, an anatomic pathologist at the University of California, Davis, said.

“it’s not like we get ‘porcelain esophagus’ or ‘porcelain stomach.’

“We don’t know specifically why the gallbladder turns porcelain, but it famously does.”

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk