Brains : the mind as matter / Marius Kwint and Richard Wingate.

  • Kwint, Marius
Date:
2012
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Brains : the mind as matter / Marius Kwint and Richard Wingate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Cabinet of ‘Brains of Educated Orderly Persons’ Burt Green Wilder Collection, 1890s Black-and-white photograph DIVISION OF RARE AND MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS, CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ins O' Educaied Orderly Persons Nrt or Public Exhibition. I ; 1 Collecting brains Equipped with chemical preservation methods that allowed the indefinite storage of entire brains, a few ambitious anatomists such as Burt Green Wilder at Cornell University in upstate New York set about systematically collecting them for the purposes of anthropometric comparison. Brain-collecting was only one facet of the great classifying endeavour to which Western knowledge-gatherers were then subjecting the entire globe. At the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Edward Spitzka began drawing up a list of the brain weights of eminent persons, in which both the top and bottom positions would be occupied by famous writers: Ivan Turgenev at 2012 grams and Anatole France at 1016 grams. Biographical accounts appeared in learned journals, correlating the qualities of well-known personages in life with the properties of their brains in death. By the twilight of the 19th century, staining techniques that revealed the beautifully dendritic, or tree-shaped, structure of brain cells began to indicate how brains functioned at the microscopic level as a network of interconnecting neurons. The subdiscipline of 'cytoarchitectonics',
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