The walls of a basement at the University of Odense in Denmark are decorated with shelves containing more than 9,000 human brain samples, believed to be the largest collection of human brain samples in the world.
Agence France-Presse reported that the crypt contained 9,479 human brain samples, taken from the corpses of mental patients. The collection drive lasted 40 years and was halted until the 1980s.
These human brain samples are preserved in formalin and packed in large white barrels with numbers. They are the result of a lifetime of collecting by Erik Strömgren, a renowned Danish psychiatrist.
Jesper Veji Krugh, an expert on the history of psychiatry, told AFP that the collection of brains began in 1945 as “an experimental study”.
Stroglin and his colleagues thought “maybe they could find information about where mental illness was occurring, or maybe they thought they could find the answer in the minds of these people,” Waaksiklag said.
The brains came from psychiatric hospitals across Denmark, where autopsies were performed after patients died. But this was done without the consent of the deceased or the family.
“These are public psychiatric hospitals, and no one from the outside world is questioning what’s going on in these public institutions,” Wackiklag said.
Patient rights were not a priority at the time. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen said at the time it was believed that society needed to be protected from mental illness.
From 1929 to 1967, Danish law required that people sent to mental institutions be sterilized. And until 1989, the mentally ill had to obtain a special dispensation to marry.
The person in charge of these brain samples, pathologist Martin Wirenfeldt Nielsen, explained that in the past the Danes had to be autopsied after death. “It was part of the culture at the time and an autopsy was just another hospital procedure.”
Due to the development of postmortem procedures in Denmark and increasing awareness of patients’ rights, no new human brain samples have been added to the collection since 1982.
But then there was a long and heated debate about what to do with the batch of human brain samples. The Danish National Ethics Committee eventually ruled that the samples should be preserved and used for scientific research.
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