Student Brings Yale’s Quite Literal Brain Trust to Light
With so many great minds at Yale University, the last place Christopher Wahl expected to find 600 of them was in dusty old jars beneath his dormitory.
As a first-year medical student, he listened keenly as upperclassmen told him the eerie legend of a cache of bottled brains located deep within the subbasement of Edward S. Harkness Hall.
Then his curiosity got the better of him.
Sometime after midnight--and after a few drinks--he and four other students descended to the former bomb shelter. Their voices hushed so as not to be detected, they picked the lock using a piece of wire. They passed a dimly lit collection of boxes, old furniture, a gurney and other flotsam long since forgotten.
Then they found them: On dirty shelves, rows and rows of brains. Each floated in a gallon jar of formaldehyde, yellow, brown and gray.
Wahl had no idea that they had found a meticulously gathered collection that chronicled the scientific beginnings of neurosurgery. He was just worried about getting caught.
“I could just see telling my parents I got thrown out of medical school for this,” said the 28-year-old Wahl, who graduates in May.
Wahl made his discovery in 1991. For a year, he kept it secret but remained haunted by the photographic negatives that accompanied the specimens: the faraway look in the eyes of a little girl in agony, a bony woman with a massive brain tumor seeping out of her skull.
“This is not like finding canned fruit in the basement,” he said. “It was almost harrowing finding them, because you realize these were people. The photos are riveting, compelling, very emotional.”
Through some research, Wahl learned that the specimens were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing, a pioneer in brain surgery and, at his death in 1939, Yale’s Sterling professor of neurology.
When Wahl finally approached faculty with the discovery, he did not face expulsion. The discovery was hailed as a momentous historical find.
“I thought this was a wonderful thing,” said Dr. Dennis Spencer, Yale’s chief of neurosurgery. “Many of the faculty knew they were there, but the outside world really forgot.”
Wahl said he was relieved that “no one really asked, ‘What were you doing skulking around the bottom of the dorm?’ ”
Cushing’s brain-tumor registry contains more than 2,000 case studies, including whole brain specimens and tumors, more than 50,000 pages of records, notes, journal excerpts and about 15,000 photographic negatives. The material dates from the late 1800s to 1936.
Cushing was responsible for transforming brain surgery from a bizarre novelty to a legitimate science, even as some of his grossly disfigured patients were relegated to freak shows and institutions.
When he began performing surgery before the turn of the century, Cushing’s mortality rate was more than 90%. By the time he last used a scalpel in the 1930s, the rate was down to 10% because of innovations, many of which he developed.
His use of equipment to monitor a patient under anesthesia and surgical tools that he invented to stop bleeding during operations were considered revolutionary.
Cushing followed his patients’ cases for years, and they usually gave him permission to perform their autopsies and use their bodies to help science, Wahl said.
Many of the deformities are not seen in the United States today because of early diagnosis and modern technology. Cushing’s photographs provide some of the only images of such afflicted people outside the Third World.
Wahl became so absorbed in the archive that he took a year off from his studies to collate Cushing’s slides and photographs with the medical histories, drawings and notes. Although he is writing his thesis on Cushing’s work, he plans to enter another field: orthopedic surgery.
Because of Wahl’s efforts, Cushing’s pictures, surgical tools, a narrative history and one of the brains are on display at the Yale Medical School for the first time.
But Wahl has higher goals. He is trying to raise a $150,000 endowment, create a Cushing database and find a place to preserve the entire collection at Yale. Most of the brains remain in the basement where they were found.
Cushing started the registry in 1902 after a mishap at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The pathology department lost a pituitary cyst he had excised. In a fury, he decided to catalog his own specimens.
Cushing spent most of his career at Harvard University and for many years kept his collection at the school, hoping the archive would remain there. But Harvard turned him down.
When Cushing took a post at Yale in 1934, the specimens followed him to New Haven. For years, surgeons and scholars traveled to Yale to study Cushing’s work. But after a while, interest waned because new techniques in medical science eclipsed Cushing’s procedures.
“When the collection was 15 to 20 years old, it wasn’t new enough to be considered cutting-edge science, but it wasn’t old enough to have historical value,” Wahl said.
The specimens were moved to the basement around 1968, Spencer said, because there was little room for such a massive collection. The archive had gone largely unnoticed for years until Wahl and his friends went exploring.
Since the rediscovery, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the work and are again calling to look at the brains, Wahl said.
“It’s fun for me just because there are generations of physicians who never knew the brains were down there,” Wahl said.
