Thousands of Danish brains in plastic buckets

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1945, two Danish scientists opened an institute to study mental illnesses.

In the four decades until it closed, almost 10,000 brains were collected from dead psychiatric patients and stored in plastic buckets.

However, they were removed during autopsies without seeking permission from relatives. Following much debate in the 1990s, it was decided they should be used for research.

Now based in the University of Southern Denmark, the collection is believed to be the world’s largest brain bank. Scientists hope it can help our understanding of mental illness and brain disease.

Adrienne Murray speaks to pathologist and caretaker of the brains, Martin Wirenfeldt Nielsen.

(Photo: Brains stored in plastic buckets at the University of Southern Denmark. Credit: BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Once you've wrapped up this podcast, how about trying a very British cult?
0:06.0	What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are?
0:10.0	I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas.
0:16.4	Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth.
0:23.0	Discover more of our biggest podcast from 2003.
0:27.0	Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me
0:39.4	Adrian Murray. I'm going to tell you an extraordinary story about collection of thousands of
0:48.1	brains and to do that we're taking you now to Denmark where it's 1945.
0:55.0	World War II has ended and the Nordic country has been liberated from German occupation.
1:01.0	We've had the most welcome duty of carrying out the official liberation of the oppressed countries of
1:05.2	Scandinavia, beginning with Denmark's capital Copenhagen.
1:08.5	In the same year, the Institute of Brain Pathology is founded.
1:12.3	Behind it are two prominent scientists.
1:14.8	Eric Stromgren, a Danish physician and psychiatrist, and Larras Einason,
1:19.6	Denmark's first professor of anatomy.
1:22.0	They made the Institute of Brain Pathology, as they called it,
1:25.0	to be the basis of research in the brain and mental disease.
1:30.0	That's pathologist Dr Martin Vernefeld Nielsen, who also heads the brain collection at the University of Southern Denmark.
1:37.0	Back then and even today, really, we do not know very much about what is actually going on in the brain in mental disease.
1:44.0	Over the next four decades, the Institute amasses almost 10,000 brains from deceased psychiatric
1:50.5	patients.
1:51.5	The brain collection was begun back in 1945 just after the Second World War and then they continued collecting
	...

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