In my first post I reminisced about meeting Mr. Turner’s brain. Scientists and students today depend on the generosity of people like Mr. Turner who choose, in life, to gift their brains. Most of these donations are stored in brain banks, for the benefit of research into neurological and psychiatric illness. The International Brain Banking Network lists dozens of these repositories around the world, all of them dependent on the altruism of donors.
It wasn’t always so. Back in the 17th century, when the methods for preserving body parts were first developed, pathologists had to rely on the grisly work of body snatchers to gain access to human brains. According to historian Cathy Gere, difficulty obtaining brains meant there was a “brisk trade” in specimens between private London, Paris and Edinburgh medical schools. Anytime an anatomy teacher retired, there was a mad rush to buy their specimens at auction.
A key pioneer in brain preservation at this time was the Dutch surgeon Frederik Ruysch (1638 -1731), whose own personal collection included dozens of brain parts. However, Ruysch didn’t treat these specimens in quite the same way as modern scientists. He created creepy macabre displays using various body parts, including fetal skeletons weeping into handkerchiefs made of brain meninges (the thin lining under the skull)!
In 18th century England, access to brains became a little easier when the “Murder Act” was passed, which meant that judges could include dissection as part of sentences for murderers. An influential brain collector at this time was the Scottish obstetrician William Hunter (1718-1783). He bequeathed his collection to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, which at the end of the 19th century included over 50 brains.
Another figure who recognised the importance of preserving brains was Paul Broca (1824-1880) – famed for his work establishing the usual dependence of language function on the left
brain hemisphere. Cathy Gere believes Broca may have succeeded in persuading his peers partly because he was able to point to the patterns of damage in the preserved brains of his aphasic patients. Broca sent these brains – including the one belonging to the landmark case of Leborgne – to the Musée Dupuytren in Paris, where they can still be seen to this day.
Unfortunately the collection and study of post mortem brains during this era was also driven by an unsavoury motive – to establish the intellectual superiority of white people over the indigenous people of colonial lands. Anatomists of the 19th and early 20th centuries engaged in this futile project by examining and racially categorising the brains of poor people who’d died in state hospitals, and comparing them to the brains of eminent deceased white people.
A particularly prolific dissecter of “eminent brains” was the US anatomist Edward Anthony Spitzka (1876-1922) whose papers include: A Study of the Brains of Six Eminent Scientists and Scholars Belonging to the American Anthropometric Society and A Study of the Brain of The Late Major J.W. Powell. In the latter paper, Spitzka comments that Powell will be remembered for his “vigorous brainy qualities” and that the study of his grey matter will allow correlation of his “pronounced mental characteristics with the anatomical appearances of the brain.”
This fascination with the brains of highly successful men sounds rather quaint today, but really it’s never gone away. Only this year another paper was published on the brain anatomy of Albert Einstein.
Probably the darkest days of brain collection and preservation unfolded in the Nazi era when neuroscientist Julius Hallervorden took advantage of the German state’s euthanasia programme to amass hundreds of brains. Interrogated after the war, he said creepily: “There was wonderful material among those brains, beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease.”
Thankfully today’s “brain banks” are sourced ethically and their aims are laudable – to provide material that will aid our understanding of brain diseases. According to Gere, the world’s first true brain bank for research purposes was created in the late 19th century after the West Riding Lunatim Asylum in Yorkshire appointed its own in-house pathologist W. Lloyd Andriezen, who set about archiving the brains of over 100 patients. When other scientists were focused (as they are today) mostly on the brain’s neurons, Andriezen used these stored brains to perform some of the first detailed studies of the brain’s glial cells, now known to be incredibly important in their own right.
--If you’re interested in donating your own brain, the Human Tissue Authority in the UK has a fact-sheet. Various institutions in the US also provide guidance, such as Stanford’s Brain Donation program and the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Centre.
--The source for much of this post was Gere, C. (2003). A brief history of brain archiving. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 12(4), 396-410.
