Mental health has a very dark history in Denmark. A 2014 study shows that 40% of Danish women and 30% of Danish men receive treatment for a disease. mental health disorder at some point in your life. More than 60 years ago, our understanding of what was going on in the brain was even more limited. In the 1930s, for example, lobotomy was a common procedure performed without the consent of patients or their families. All this brings us to an interesting history of the Scandinavian country on science, psychiatry and ethics.

Or how 10,000 human brains ended up in a basement in Denmark.

In 1945, the year when peace came to Denmark after World War II, two doctors had an idea: “What would happen if the brains of those who died in mental hospitals were removed and preserved?” This proposal led them to create. largest brain collection of the world. That same year, they founded the Institute for Brain Pathology in Risskov, hoping that future doctors could re-examine them as science advances.

As a result, in the cold, gray basement of the University of Southern Denmark, one of the country’s largest universities, there are endless rows of shelves of numbered white boxes. Each has a human brain preserved in formaldehyde. In total, 9,479.

These were removed during autopsies of patients who died between 1940 and 1980. And they still stand there today and represent part of the Danish mental history. There are 5,500 brains with dementia, 1,400 with schizophrenia, 400 with bipolar disorder, and 300 with depression.

The procedure was simple: after the autopsies, the doctors removed the organ from the corpse, buried it, examined it and wrote detailed notes. “brain diaries”. Many were sent from public hospitals in Denmark. It was then stored in boxes for weeks before being disassembled and placed in a formaldehyde solution for preservation.

Thomas Erslev, research consultant at Aarhus University, estimates that half of all psychiatric patients in Denmark donate their brains unknowingly and without their consent. “We know who the patients are, where they were born and when they died. We also have their diagnosis and post-mortem neuropathology reports,” Martin Wirenfeldt Nielsen, now head of brain collection at the University of Southern Denmark, tells this BBC. article.

However, the collection had to stop in 1982 due to financial reasons and in 2017 it was moved to another city, Odense. This act brought to light the existence of this collection, which was kept secret from Danish society.

Ethical discussion on collection

The discovery of this brain bank would start one of the first discussions on the subject. ethical science In Denmark and on a subject that has been put aside for years: mental health. However, the main problem and source of criticism was the hiding of brains without permission from the patient or their relatives.

You must also understand that psychiatric patients at that time had very few rights. Sometimes they even received treatment without any approval. A study conducted in 2022 revealed that most of the patients were attacked during this period. Patients undergoing forced sterilization and sterilization, among other procedures. lobotomies.

“You can get treatment without saying yes to this particular treatment, and at that time patients were not considered equal to other Danes,” explains Jesper Vaczy Kragh, a senior researcher at the Copenhagen Humanities Center for Health Research (CoRe). this Euronews article.

The debate over what to do with the collection went on for years. Since the brains were collected unauthorized Many of the patients and their relatives argued that it is not recommended to continue the collection from an ethical point of view.

Therefore, he set out to dismember organs or bury them next to the sick. However, another obstacle was the detection of all the graves of the corpses to which those brains belonged. It was even suggested that all brains be buried in one place.

A few years later, the Danish Ethics Committee decided that their use in scientific research without parental consent was ethically acceptable. This is the collection and all its documents today can be used by any researcher and the University of Southern Denmark are working to digitize these records to improve public access.

Experts believe that this collection offers researchers many advantages. In addition to providing information and case examples from different demographics, it allows them to examine the effects of modern psychiatric treatment, as some of the brains belong to people who have never received modern medicine.

Images: Aarhus University Hospital

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