The first time Harvey Cushing came to Yale University, it was as a newly minted college student in the late 1880s. He graduated in 1891 with a bachelor’s degree before moving on to Harvard Medical School. Ultimately, he would spend his entire clinical career outside the state of Connecticut – practicing first at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore before becoming the surgeon-in-chief at the Brigham Hospital in Boston. He wouldn’t return to Yale until the 1930s when he became a professor in Neurology at the medical school, passing on knowledge collected during his storied career.
For this famous former Nutmegger, though, it was another personal collection that became the basis for an entirely new – and ever-evolving – field of medicine.
When he returned to New Haven, he brought his knowledge, surgical skill, and also something much more curious: his extensive collection of preserved human brains and tumors.
That collection has resided at Yale Medical School for nearly a century, in a collection now known as the Cushing Center, but that first resided in a building that, if you didn’t know the history it once housed, would be quite unremarkable among the cohesive design of the Yale campus.
“[The collection] came with Doctor Louise Eisenhardt and Cushing,” explains Terry Dagradi, the Cushing Center’s curator. “They set it up above ground in pathology across the street.”
When Cushing died, his protégé, Louise Eisenhardt kept up the collection for teaching and research, but once she was gone in the 60s, no one was left to care for it.
“It gets passed on to the next person who realizes it doesn’t have the same value, but let’s not throw it away, which very well could have happened,” says Dagradi. “Instead, he moves it into what became known as the brain room.”
The Brain Room, a storage area in a sub-basement, is where it remained for decades. But the sub-basement was not an ideal location for a collection of specimens – at least, not for learning from them. It was, however, great for a very different kind of enjoyment. It became a place for students to hang out, drink, and have a good time among the brains.
“That went on for many, many years,” says Dagradi. “At some point, someone said, hey. Let’s create a brain society.”
The Brain Society was an unofficial club with dozens, if not many more, members throughout the years. No official membership roster exists but at some point, someone decided to create a poster that members could sign to record their membership. That sign now sits inside the entrance to the collection’s new permanent home and at least one of the signatories, Mike Deluna, went on to become a professor at Yale himself.
When, Christopher Wahl, a student in the 90s who went on to become an orthopedic surgeon, decided to use the collection to do his thesis project, the exhibit he created with it generated a lot of excitement and a new understanding of the importance of this hidden collection. Unfortunately, however, that excitement was short-lived.
It wasn’t until 2010 that the school found a permanent home for the collection that honored both the doctor who created it and the patients whose brains and tumors make it up.
“It took about 15 years and a lot of negotiating before we found a place that would really work to move this collection,” says Dagradi. “Ultimately, coming underneath Harvey’s books turned out to be the best sort of combination of these two collections.”
Brain surgery can be dangerous even with today’s modern knowledge and technology, and when Cushing was first studying medicine, it was almost exclusively a death sentence.
“When he’s first starting around 1900, your chances of survival are pretty thin,” explains Dagradi. “There’s a 90% chance you’ll just bleed to death when they open up your head.”
For some patients, death was inevitable without surgery as well and despite the odds, patients underwent incredibly risky procedures. Throughout his career, Cushing worked tirelessly to find ways to lower the risk to his patients, taking great care to minimize damage and blood loss.
“He went as far as he could go until he realized the patient had maybe lost too much blood. Let him stabilize for a couple days. And then a few days later, he goes back in and completes the operation,” Dagradi explains, relating the story of Leonard Wood, one of the founders of the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC) and Cushing’s most famous patient.
Cushing removed a meningioma, a large tumor in Wood’s brain, during that surgery. Years later, the tumor would recur and even though Wood wasn’t in the best shape, Cushing decided to do the surgery again.
“Cushing starts operating and starts to get a little bit too deep and realizes that maybe he clipped an artery. He wasn’t sure, but there was a lot of bleeding. He was getting really concerned. They bring in three different people to give him blood, just direct transfusions. [Wood] goes down, and he never recovers from that.”
Wood’s tumors and his brain then went on to become part of Cushing’s growing collection of specimens, which he would use to learn for himself and teach students new concepts in the emerging field of neurosurgery.
The collection is now housed in an unassuming building as part of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. If you walk past the rotunda, with its vaulted ceilings and advertisements for lectures, and then through the modern library, you will reach a very different section of the building, one that feels older and more serious. A metal marker on the floor dedicates the library to its illustrious namesake. Shields around the circular first room denote the dozens of universities that awarded Cushing honorary degrees throughout the years.
Through doors on either side of this wide-open room are the other items Cushing donated to Yale at the end of his life: his books. Perhaps not as flashy as what lies two stories down, the thousands of volumes shelved here represent an extensive history of medicine – with books donated not just by Cushing, but by John F. Fulton and Arnold C. Klebs as well.
Fulton was a neurophysicist, a professor at Yale Medical School, and a friend of Cushing’s who persuaded him to join the faculty after his time at Brigham. Klebs, meanwhile, was a pioneering doctor in the study of tuberculosis. While he had no personal connection to Yale, he was also a friend of Cushing’s who agreed to donate his books to him to be included in the burgeoning library.
The three men each had extensive collections of rare books on early medicine and anatomy. Included are volumes by the likes of Andreas Vesalius, one of the most influential figures in early anatomy.
These books are available for medical students to peruse, offering them a unique perspective on early medical research. Over the last several years, librarians have worked to digitize some of these volumes, making them available publicly.
Dagradi says it’s an ongoing project, “There’s a great digital online presence of a lot of materials. But some of the more esoteric books aren’t all digitized yet because we sort of digitized as the demand or as grants are given.”
The main level of the library is open to the public, but the brain collection two floors down is only accessible to non-students during regularly scheduled tours. And when you walk down those stairs, past classrooms and through a plain wooden door, you may understand why. The collection room is lined floor to ceiling with hundreds of specimen jars, tightly packed onto shelves at eye level and higher. The room is dimly lit and climate controlled, the initial entry a narrow hall where specimens are surrounded by diagrams, notes, newspaper clippings, and photographs from Cushing’s patient files.
The room is not large, but it is well laid out, packing decades of medical research into the small space. Small display cases line the lower walls and drawers are curated to tell the stories of individual patients and colleagues of Cushing’s, his well-catalogued collection allowing museum staff to construct remarkably detailed stories to accompany the specimens.
The hallway opens into the larger – but not large – room where memorabilia from Cushing’s days as a Yale student are interspersed with photographs and journals from his life as a physician. Adjacent to this wall is another where a cabinet opens to display poster-sized enlargements of selections from Cushing’s library, including Renaissance wood cuttings of Vesalius’ public autopsies, drawings from Asian scientists, Cushing’s own sketches, and a single page from his handwritten tumor registry, compiled by protégé Louise Eisenhardt, one of the first neuropathologists.
“This sheet right here is one of the data sheets that Louise Eisenhardt put together with the tiny little black booklets,” explains Dagradi, gesturing to the enlarged page of handwritten notes. “This notified that it is the 2,000th verified brain tumor operation. Meaning, they suspected tumors, and then they wanted to find out if that was actually the true thing.”
But while the custodians of Cushing’s century-old collection are proud of the work and the history it represents, they are also particularly aware of evolving ethical responsibilities. The past few years have seen a reconning for museum curators across the country and around the world. Public pressure to right the historical wrongs of colonialism has led museum leadership to consider repatriating some of their artifact collections. The Smithsonian, for instance, returned its 29 Benin bronze sculptures to Nigeria in 2022, and most recently, has had to begin the work of returning Native American artifacts and human remains to “lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.”
Human remains in particular carry a host of ethical concerns, as modern understandings of consent bring how these collections were amassed under much more intense scrutiny. This is especially true for legacy collections amassed at a time when the individual who became a specimen may not have had any idea what would become of their remains.
Dagradi says the Cushing Center team is more aware of this than ever before, as they consider how modern ethical standards change the way the brain and tumor collection is viewed. In the last few years, they have taken steps to anonymize the displayed specimens, covering the names on the labels to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which didn’t exist during Cushing’s time.
Cushing’s collection, though, does include things that other legacy collections may not. Since the specimens were collected from Cushing’s patients and since he kept such extensive notes, photographs, and ledgers, every specimen can be attached to a person, a face, a diagnosis, and a story, allowing staff to provide greater context for the displayed brains if asked.
“These numbers are the numbers you find in the jar,” she says, gesturing back to the enlarged notations of tumors. “And now we can put this into the database. I can pick this out and then our database will help me find the patient record and where the jar is and other things, and we can start to tell the story.”
In fact, Dagradi says that family members have reached out to the Cushing Center to learn more about their long-lost relatives and, so far, they have not received any complaints.“We did have one gentleman about two years ago donated his brain,” she says. “He knew he was dying – I think it was a glioblastoma – and he knew he was dying, so he wanted to leave his brain because he had, like, a great-grandmother whose brain is in his collection. She also had glioblastoma.”
Still, Dagradi says that — despite the belief that the collection is respectful to its specimens and educationally beneficial — she and her colleagues are watching the debate.
“We have not had one negative thing,” she says. “We’ve only had bioethical pushback from — mostly from within the medical school. But I think the reckoning is only getting stronger.”
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