ABSTRACT
The commercial exploitation of thanatic morbidity was the experience of Dr. Ciro Caraballo Perichi in the Mummies Museum in Guanajuato during his visit in 2005. Due to lack of knowledge or incompetence, certain human remains in this Mexican city have been a source of tension between the interests in economic income generated by permitting access for their appreciation, and the ethical reasons that justify their exposition. Ethical considerations won out in 2017 when emotional connections between the visitor and the exposition were proposed; that is, to value the largest contemporary collection of natural mummies in the world through an unprecedented exercise of patrimonial interpretation, finally becoming a discourse on museology that integrated literary, legal, historic and scientific content such as interactive elements based on existential psychology. These measures were in line with the technical position taken afterwards by the National Bioethics Commission (announced for the first time) that dictates that this heritage be preserved to safeguard these cultural rights and investigate and contextualize the exhibition to return the posthumous dignity to these (at the time unknown) individuals, whose cadavers were mummified.
