'Brain desirable,' Part 1
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2023
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
When Mary died in 1933, her brain was sent to a man named Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian’s ‘bone doctor.’ Post reporters couldn’t find any records that Mary or her family consented to this. So what happened to Mary’s brain? And what is the extent of the Smithsonian’s “racial brain collection”?
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The brain of a Sami woman who died at a Seattle sanitarium in 1933. The cerebellum of an indigenous Filipino who died at the 1904 World’s Fair. These are just two of the brains collected over the last century by the Smithsonian’s first curator of the physical anthropology division, Ales Hrdlicka.
Now, a hundred years after this brain collection began, The Washington Post has pieced together the most extensive look at this work to date. And over the next two days on Post Reports, we’re bringing you the details of this reporting and of Ales Hrdlicka’s troubling legacy. In this first episode, we find out the extent of the collection, and we begin the search for the descendants of Mary, the Sami woman whose brain was taken in 1933.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the year 1933, a young woman named Mary was hospitalized at a sanitarium near Seattle. |
| 0:08.9 | She just turned 18 and she was dying of tuberculosis. |
| 0:14.9 | At first, we didn't know much about Mary beyond those facts, but one thing stood out. |
| 0:20.8 | She was Sami, the indigenous people of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and parts of Russia. |
| 0:27.7 | The spring Mary died, without her family beside her. |
| 0:32.2 | But one person was there, a doctor named Charles Firestone. |
| 0:38.2 | On the day he signed her death certificate, Firestone sent off a telegram to one of the |
| 0:43.2 | most prominent research institutions in the world, the U.S. National Museum. |
| 0:49.8 | Today, a large part of that museum is now known as the Smithsonian's National Museum of |
| 0:56.5 | Natural History. |
| 0:59.7 | In his telegram, Firestone offered something remarkable, Mary's brain. |
| 1:05.4 | He wrote that if a Sami brain was of interest to the museum, that he could quote, obtain |
| 1:10.4 | one today. |
| 1:15.0 | A man named Alice Herdlichka replied the same day. |
| 1:19.3 | Herdlichka was a world famous anthropologist at the Smithsonian. |
| 1:23.8 | He was also a collector of body parts. |
| 1:27.8 | Herdlichka said that he wanted Mary's brain. |
| 1:30.8 | He telegrammed back only seven words. |
| 1:34.0 | If the subject full blood, brain desirable. |
| 1:41.0 | Probably most people when they walk into the Smithsonian have no idea that the collection |
| 1:45.0 | has over 30,000 sets of human remains, and that most people that I tell that to are |
| 1:49.6 | shocked. |
... |
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