Indiana Medical History Museum

The oldest surviving pathology lab in America has 150 original chairs, 1,450 documented autopsies, and a wall of unnamed brains in jars.

The amphitheater still has the original wooden chairs. 150 of them, arranged in steep rows facing a dissection table in the middle of the floor. Between 1896 and 1948, roughly 1,450 autopsies were performed on that table in front of those chairs, almost all of them on patients from the insane asylum next door. The Indiana Medical History Museum is what happened to the pathology lab when the hospital around it was torn down. It is the oldest surviving pathology laboratory in the United States, and it is open to the public.

Dr. George F. Edenharter ran Central State Hospital from 1893 to 1923 and decided his asylum needed its own autopsy facility. The Swiss-American architect Adolf Scherrer designed one for him in 1895, nineteen rooms over two stories in red brick on the same campus as the main hospital. The amphitheater held the autopsies. On a heavy week Edenharter's pathologists worked three or four a day on patients who had died in the wards upstairs. The rest of the building covered everything that came before and after the table: bacteriological labs, a chemistry lab, a histology room, a photography studio, the hospital morgue, and a corpse-draining table on wheels that could be rolled in front of an audience. Starting in 1900, Indiana University School of Medicine sent neurology and psychiatry students to the building for classes. That continued until 1956.

The reason the building survived when almost everything else on the Central State campus came down is the Anatomical Museum on the second floor. It contains human brains preserved in jars of formalin, collected from autopsied patients in the 1930s and 1940s. Each jar is labeled with a clinical case number and a diagnosis: idiocy, epilepsy, head injury, neurosyphilis. No names. The patients contributed to science by dying in a state hospital and leaving behind a brain that a pathologist found interesting.

Dr. Walter Bruetsch did the most important work here in the 1920s and 1930s. He studied central nervous system syphilis, then one of the leading causes of insanity in Indiana, and pioneered an experimental malaria fever treatment that cured 160 paretic patients within two years. This was before penicillin. Giving a psychiatric patient malaria on purpose to burn out their syphilis sounds grotesque now; in 1927 it was the cutting edge, and it actually worked. That is the complicated story of this building. It was both a morgue for people nobody came to claim and a laboratory where real discoveries were made.

In 1969, after the rest of Central State Hospital began its slow dismantling, the pathology building was incorporated as a nonprofit museum. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 25, 1972. In 2015, researchers launched the Rehumanizing the IMHM Specimen Collection project, trying to recover the life stories of the people whose brains sat unnamed in the jars upstairs. The Smithsonian Magazine covered the project in 2019.

Museum staff do not endorse paranormal claims. They are medical historians. But tour visitors keep describing the same three things: low conversations in rooms that don't have anyone in them, groans that move through the wall from an adjacent empty room, and a noticeable temperature drop in the amphitheater, sometimes several degrees, when visitors sit down in the original chairs. Tour groups bring these reports back to the front desk on separate visits, years apart. The museum does not promote any of it. It just keeps happening.

The building now holds over 15,000 medical artifacts. A medicinal plant garden was added outside in 2003, growing plants used in pre-industrial medicine. The autopsy table, the amphitheater chairs, the rows of brain jars, and the original dissection scopes are all still in place. On the wall near the amphitheater is a note that reminds visitors the specimens were taken from people who could not consent, that the names have been lost, and that the museum is working to recover them. Whoever wrote that note was not thinking about ghost stories. They were thinking about the jars.