New Haven, Conn.-based Yale School of Medicine is home to some of the brightest minds in medicine — and houses 2,200-plus brain specimens that were once stored beneath one of the medical school's student dorms, STAT News reports.
The specimens are part of the Cushing Brain Tumor Registry compiled by Harvey Cushing, MD, a former Yale medical school professor who is considered to be one of the founders of the field of neurosurgery.
Dr. Cushing, who died in 1939, was reportedly exhaustive in his analyses of tumors and other neurological diseases, and often asked his patients' permission to study their brains posthumously, according to STAT News. However, his collection lost relevance amid competing brain registries, and the university transferred the specimens to the basement of one of its medical school dorms in 1979.
Christopher Wahl, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Seattle-based Orthopedic Physician Associates, told STAT News he visited Dr. Cushing's collection multiple times as a Yale medical student during the late 1990s.
"It was like a shop of horrors. The overwhelming atmosphere was that you're in a place that you maybe shouldn't be in, lit by bare incandescent bulbs with a dirty floor in an old basement that smells of formaldehyde. [It was] kind of horrific or strangely beautiful or magical scene," Dr. Wahl said.
While the brain samples were eerie, Dr. Wahl said the stacks of photograph negatives also located in the space were much spookier.
"The brain specimens are spooky because they're just weird, but the thing that was most arresting was when you'd actually dust off these photographic negatives," Dr. Wahl told STAT News. "A negative is spooky no matter what you're looking at, but these were anywhere from gruesome to sort of obtusely beautiful images, and they were very much a time stamp."
Despite two planned sites for a permanent exhibition for the collection falling through, the medical school created a permanent exhibition for the specimens in 2010 located in the medical school's library. The area is referred to as the Cushing Center and contains dozens of original samples and patient photos from the early 1800s through 1936.