A Tale of Wild Bill, The Ice Man, and The Medical Museum By Jack Ostrich, MD jmost119@aol.com
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A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO on Sacramento Museum Day, when museums around the region open their doors to the public for free, a flashy sports car rumbled into the SSVMS driveway. A tall, bearded fellow and a lady walked into the Medical Museum hand-in-hand and signed the guest book. It said: “Wild Bill Hill and Roxanne.” For Wild Bill and Roxanne, “the love of his life,” as he calls her, it was the start of a relationship with the museum that continues to this day. But the story begins long ago, thousands of years ago, and is one told with the help of a mountain man found in the ice more than 5,000 years after his death. When two hikers high in the Tyrolean Alps came upon a human corpse in 1991, they notified police thinking it was possibly a recently deceased mountaineer. But when the body was extricated from the surrounding rocks and ice, it became clear that the remnants of garments and a copper axe found nearby were of ancient provenance. An archeologist from the University of Innsbruck estimated that the fellow now nicknamed “Otzi,” because he had been discovered in the Otzal alpine region, had lived about 4,000 years previously. Carbon dating later revealed he was about 5,200 years old. Otzi, much like Wild Bill, was heavily tattooed. He had 61 tattoos, mostly across his back and legs, non-representational and mostly linear, but possibly just as steeped in symbolism as the designs preferred by today’s devotees of body art. A CT scan showed significant
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degenerative changes were present in the spine, knees and ankles, mostly near or directly under the tattoos. The tattoos were found to be soot tattoos, created by rubbing soot into skin that had been punctured by finely pointed instruments such as a thorn or sharpened twig, and may have been meant to be therapeutic as well. Otzi’s body, now displayed at the Archeology Museum in Bolzano, Italy, is the oldest specimen of a tattooed human, although some Japanese figurines dating back about 10,000 years have decorations thought by some to represent tattoos. But even Egyptian mummies, which have been found with representational tattoos, aren’t nearly as old as Otzi. Tattoos were associated with wealth and social status before the Roman Empire, and the custom was possibly widespread throughout Eurasia. The Romans, who eschewed tattoos