For more
than three decades, Yale students have been taking the hinges off a
hidden door at Harkness Dormitory to sneak into the basement. There,
they would squeeze into a dimly-lit room to see brains – hundreds of
them placed on metal shelves and submerged in formaldehyde. But
the room contained something even more fascinating; a collection of
thousands of black-and-white photographs showing some of the earliest
patients of modern brain surgery.
Since the mid-1990s, students paid their respects by signing a poster in the room, becoming members of the 'Brain Society.' The brains were well-known, but the photography in the hidden basement was a surprise, according to a report in Atlas Obscura. The
images are of patients of Dr Harvey Cushing, a pioneering neurosurgeon,
who left them to Yale upon his death in 1939, along with a collection
of their brains.
The 10,000
images of patients are now being slowly unveiled to the public in an
ambitous project aiming to digitise the full collection. But the identity of most of the patients remains unknown.
'These
are photographs of patients cared for by Dr Harvey Cushing between
1900-1930s - taken for diagnostic purposes as part of the Cushing Tumor
Registry,' Terry Dagradi, Cushing Center Coordinator, told
DailyMail.com.
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