Preserved in formalin in large white buckets bearing numbers, the collection is the life’s work of the eminent Danish psychiatrist Erik Strömgren.
Countless shelves line the basement walls of Denmark’s Odense University, housing what is believed to be the largest collection of human brains in the world. 9,479 organs, removed from the cadavers of mentally ill patients over the four decades up to the 1980s.
Preserved in formalin in large white buckets bearing numbers, the collection is the life’s work of the eminent Danish psychiatrist Erik Strömgren.
It began in 1945, and it was “a kind of empirical research,” Jesper Vassi Kra, an expert in the history of psychiatry, told AFP.
“I think maybe Stromgren and his colleagues can figure out something about where mental illnesses are localized, or they think they might find the answers in those brains.”
Reveal hidden secrets
The brains were collected after autopsies were performed on the bodies of people who were treated in psychiatric institutes throughout Denmark. Permission was not sought from patients while they were alive, nor from their families after their death.
At that time, patients’ rights were not the main concern, on the contrary, the society then believed that it needed to be protected from these people.
Between 1929 and 1967, the law mandated sterilization of people working in mental institutions. Until 1989, they had to obtain a special dispensation in order to be allowed to marry.
Denmark considered “mentally ill” people, as they were called at the time, “a burden on society (and thought we) if we let them have children, if we let them go, they would cause all sorts of problems,” said University of Copenhagen researcher Vrac Krag.
Four research projects are currently using the collection
The development of postmortem procedures and a growing awareness of patients’ rights led to the end of new brains being added to the group in 1982. A long and heated debate about what to do with it then ensued. The Danish State Ethics Board eventually decided that it should be preserved and used for scientific research.
Research on the group over the years has covered a wide range of ailments, including dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
Neurobiologist Susanna Aznar, an expert on Parkinson’s disease who works at a research hospital in Copenhagen, is using the collection as part of her team’s research project. Brains are unique, she said, in that they enable scientists to see the effects of modern therapies.
