San Martín’s Inca mummy

In 1823 Peru’s liberator, the South American revolutionary José de San Martín, sent to King George IV of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover, an ‘Inca mummy’ as proof of Peru’s ancient glory and renewed sovereignty. San Martin had hoped that the king’s gift would end up in the British Museum. Instead, it went to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, where the mummy was displayed not as a product of embalming but as a specimen of natural preservation, whose desiccation was owed to dry Peruvian air and ‘the peculiar character of the soil’. This scientific view of the Royal College of Surgeons was a dreadful mistake. Hiding within San Martin’s gifted Inca mummy and his demotion by British experts to a ghastly specimen of naturalist curiosity was an erased history of Andean and Hispanic science. Andeans had applied their knowledge of local climates and the body to preserve their ancestors for an active afterlife. The removal of San Martin’s gifted Inca mummy to the Hunterian buried Andean-Hispanic knowledge, demoting the Andean dead from sacred beings to mere specimens.