Nothing is better than finding a weird or spooky place buried deep below unassuming locations, and The Cushing Center in New Haven is a prime example of this. A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a friend who is a Yale University employee. I had read some years ago in a book which I have now forgotten, that there was a hidden room deep in the belly of Yale somewhere, and brought this topic up to him. My friend knew of this exhibit, and with an eye for adventure, the two of us made plans for an expedition to what I call the Brain Museum.
The museum, known as the Cushing Center, is effectively the monument to the life and collection of the famed Doctor Harvey Cushing. Dr. C was a famous American Neurosurgeon (sometimes acknowledged as the “Father of Neurosurgery”), was the first person to successfully remove a brain tumor, and had the hormonal disorder “Cushing Syndrome” named after him. Cushing was born in 1869 and began practicing medicine after getting his medical degree from Harvard in 1885. He quickly became a leading neuroscientist and developed a deep fascination with the brain which is what eventually led to his collection. To quote The Cushing Center’s website:
“The collection began in 1902 when Dr. Harvey Cushing discovered one of his specimens was misplaced by the Johns Hopkins Pathology department. To avoid future misplacements, Cushing decided it was safest to retain the specimens himself”.
Let’s be upfront here: his collection is brains. Like a whole bunch of brains soaking in formaldehyde inside jars. So, I am going to fill in the blanks and conclude that this guy ended up keeping and storing many maligned brains from his deceased patients, and this ultimately resulted in the rather spooky Cushing Center.
My friend and I found ourselves outside of the Yale Medical Library on a rainy January evening. One can tell that there is a whole lot of “weird” stuff going on at the Cushing center because Yale does its best to keep it somewhat buried. Quite literally as the whole exhibit is in the depths of the Yale Medical Library. The center isn’t exactly advertised and is best conceptualized as a “well-known secret”. For example, on Google the Cushing Center is listed as “temporarily closed” and the security guard at the Yale Library did not believe the center was even open. But that did not stop two explorers and we continued to descend to the depths of the library. The center is rather difficult to get to as one must traverse various back staircases and unlit corridors. Additionally, one must first either be a Yale Student or work for Yale University to some degree in order to gain access to the room via a staff or student card. So before even entering the center, there are trials that one must undergo, which truly builds the tension. Nonetheless, the two of us were eventually standing outside of a dark room with the placard “The Cushing Center”. My friend held his staff card to the reader and with a green flash we were in.
When one enters the center the first thing one thinks is “wow that is a lot of Brains”. There are apparently around 450 jarred brains in the Cushing Center. But after that initial shock and awe, one begins to notice the rest of the space. The word “museum” is perhaps a generous term as it really is just one immaculately constructed room in an otherwise unexceptional basement. But the whole place is in tip-top shape, super sleek, and clean. The curators honestly did a stellar job in the actual presentation of the space with what they had. Unfortunately, what they had was a whole bunch of memorabilia from Cushing’s life, ancient surgery tools, creepy photos, skeletons, and most notably, brains.
The museum opened in 2010 as a result of generous donations from Yale alums. Prior to this, the Brains were lying dormant in the basement of a medical student dormitory. Doing research for this project was so fun, because there are so many sketchy details that the Yale website does not wish to expand on. So, I like to imagine that a bunch of Med School admins were all:
“Well we have all these brains in jars we can’t like, throw them away, right? What should we do?”
“Idk, put them in the basement of a student dorm?”
In a twist of fate that no one could have seen coming, this resulted in adventurous students breaking into the storage center and discovering a haunted corridor of dusty jars that contained human brains. This was described by the students as “like a shop of horrors” and “ghostly”. Furthermore, there were all of Cushing’s photographs in the basement as well (which I will get to later), only adding to the grim atmosphere. It does feel like the origin of some 90s-horror film, and reading about the room shows how brave these students were. They must have thought themselves pretty cool as well because one of these folks put a poster in the room with the words “The Brain Society”, to which other investigative students signed their names. 20 years later, a member of this Brain Society would be the person leading the charge to develop the Cushing Center to what it is today. The brains had a lasting impact on those brave enough to explore the haunted basement and the Brain Society poster remains in The Cushing Center today.
(image from https://library.medicine.yale.edu/cushingcenter/about/brain-society)
As one navigates the room, the jars of Brains are ordered on shelves at around eye level. The Brains themselves are equally disturbing and intriguing. On each dusty jar, there is a time-yellowed label with the date and the name of the person that the brain belonged to. It’s full-on macabre. My understanding is that the majority of these brains are the result of trying to remove brain tumors or autopsies, but it’s not exactly clear. Experiments perhaps, whispers the subconscious, because one cannot help but think that. And while a good lot of the brains are just untouched brain in pickling juice, some of the brains are chopped up in half or in bits, and that fully made me want to yack.
The collection is not only brains. No, there are a lot of other things in the Cushing Center. If it was just the brains then maybe it wouldn’t be toooo weird, but I think the more and more one looks at the additional content the weirder and more unsettling the room becomes. The creepieness exceeded the sum of its parts, and brains in jars are pretty creepy to begin with. There are artifacts from Cushing’s life, including photos and badges, which personalize the center to being idiosyncratically his. But then it then gets near sinister. There’s a full-on human skeleton in the corner of a person that suffers from acromegaly or excessive growth due to hormonal disorders. There’s also a horse skull. The Cushing Center also displays a wide collection of photographs, featuring disturbing images of early brain surgery all the way to black and white photos of human beings with non-normative physical features. Considering this was all one man’s collection it does feel a bit “Dahmer” on a personal level and then a testimate to creepy medical history on a vocational level.
What really pushed it over the limit for me was the posters. My friend opened up a little cabinet in the back corner of the room and said “Hey Shae check this out” and revealed a collection of posters. There is no explanation or context for exactly what the posters represent, so they simply solidify this whole place as a “serial killer’s lair”. The posters are a wide range of things, but for the most part, they are ancient anatomical drawings from different cultures. But there are some things that are properly “psycho” such as star charts and images of Dragons which inspires thoughts of Hannibal Lecter.
Here’s my hypothesis: I think that because of Cushing’s reputation and perhaps ties they needed to put this collection somewhere and display it, because brains in the basement would not fly. They decided to make it as hard to find and to get to as possible, but once found they realized they needed to do it right, and by doing Cushing “right” involves ostensibly reconstructing Dr. Frankenstein’s lair. My criticism is that there are not many readily available explanations for a lot of the “big picture” items in the collection, so therefore one’s mind makes assumptions based on horror movie tropes. It only would seem natural to find a dusty book with a fleshy binding written entirely in Latin.
Obviously, there are a lot of questionable ethics in this space. I couldn’t help but think, “wow each of these brains was once inside people’s skulls and had its own feelings and consciousness. How would they feel about their chopped brains being on display? What were their lives like? Was there a release form?” The lives of the brains are not featured in this display, and I think that humanizing element would alter how I felt about the space. If we consider the brain as the center of consciousness, then this museum is effectively a graveyard of 450 people. It’s hard to not sense “icky-ness” here, especially considering these brains were getting collected from 1897-1933, periods with questionable medical practices, pseudo-sciences, and the great depression. Again…it is possible that Cushing was a fully socially conscious man with an ethical compass and extreme medical curiosity, but the center does not fully convey that because of how disturbing and mad-scientistesque it seems. The website states that “The space is designed to give visitors a unique experience showing Cushing as a caring surgeon, author, collector, and bibliophile” which is such a wild sentence because “caring surgeon” and “underground brain collection” seem incompatible.
The video above adds to how this space is both advertised and received through a haze of confusion. It is a clip of Connecticut New Channel 8’s “Cruising Connecticut” segment on the Cushing Center. In this short clip, they literally do backflips to avoid how creepy the museum is and to not mention talking about the steps on how 450 brains came to be put in jars in a New Haven basement. It’s an exceptionally chaotic segment, even for local news; they throw out random facts like “He was the captain of the baseball team” and “no one knew he was dyslexic” all while the newscaster, Ryan, tries and fails to make jokes. The video seems to be more about “brains” in general than on the Cushing Center. The woman in the video, who appears to work at the Cushing center but there is no context given, describes how when children visit the Cushing Center they ask, “are these brains still thinking,” which is a horrifying scenario to imagine. The Cruising Connecticut segment ends to reveal Ryan and his two fellow newscasters. “A little bit eerie I have to say,” Ryan says, suddenly realizing that this was a macabre subject, as the other newscasters look at him in disgust.
This video demonstrates that no one is certain who this display is for, it’s just a disturbing thing dwelling in the New Haven underground, and I think Cushing’s prestige and Yale’s Ivy clout make this exhibit seem “normal” or “okay to exist”, when it may just a creepy artifact of questionable medical history. If it was more substantiated and humanizing, for example, talked about how these people volunteered for their brains to be put on display and the layers of legitimate paperwork that allowed for this museum to exist, then maybe it would settle a little better in my belly. But as far as I can tell, the museum just takes it as a given that these brains rightfully belong to Cushing’s collection, as immaterial as books and photos, and the lack of humanizing information makes this whole display seem little more than a vanity project. Let me admit though, I did not dig all too deep when researching this project; for the most part I wrote about the information I received from the display and website, and therefore I made assumptions about the ethics of the display. But for something like this, one should not need to “dig deep” in order to be informed about the ethics of the center because otherwise, one assumes the worse. And because there isn’t any additional info then maybe it is the worse. I do think that this does speak to an almost instinctual feeling about something feeling off, and the fact that the museum doesn’t do anything to assuage this feeling only confirms one’s thoughts. Ultimately I think the Brain Museum place is worth discussing, as it is a strange, intriguing, and absolutely weird exhibit in the underbelly of New Haven.
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