[Examination of the skull of Stanislaw Papczynski (1631-1701)--the founder of the fraternity of Marian Priests].

Procedures of identifying an individual on the basis of skeletal remains are of interest to anthropologists, anatomists, morphologists, physicians and criminologists. The results of such procedures are immensely significant, both from the cognitive point of view, as they allow for determining the range of variability of human traits, and from the practical standpoint, in forensic-medical procedures. The methodical aspect of the procedures represents an important problem since the reliability of the employed identification techniques determines the probability with which we can reconstruct the intravital appearance of an individual. The theoretical grounds for the criteria used for person's identification on the basis of skeletal remains are provided by the results of studies on variability of anatomic and morphologic structures and on reciprocal relations between the soft tissues and bony sublayer on which the soft tissues are distributed. Following the process of exhumation on February 12, 2007, in March, we received the skull of Father Stanisław Papczyński, the founder of the fraternity of Marian Priests, with the objective of performing an anthropological examination and reconstructing his face. The examinations were commissioned in association with the ceremony of his beatification planned for September 2007. We used the "POL-SIT Rekonstrukcja" computer-assisted system of intravital face reconstruction, which represents a universal human face reconstruction system, based on the skull pattern introduced to the computer. Computed tomography CT was performed employing a Siemens tomograph Somatom Sensation 64. The 3 D reconstruction of the skull was achieved using the "In Space" software.