Dollco


HumanitiesCMAJ

© 2012 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors CMAJ, May 15, 2012, 184(8) 925

Brains, The Mind as Matter
Marius Kwint and Lucy Shanahan, Curators
Wellcome Collection
London, UK
March 29, 2012 to June 17, 2012

A
fter I saw this exhibition, I
tried to choose which ele-
ment affected me the most.

Was it the photographer’s picture of
herself in the head brace with the nee-
dle going in? Was it the photo of the
kid awaiting brain surgery? The letter
from a mother donating her child’s
brain? The video of the top of a head
being put back on? 

Guest curator Marius Kwint, Senior
Lecturer in Visual Culture at the Uni-
versity of Portsmouth, explained that
the exhibition was not meant to be a
gruesome delight. Rather, it shows
through objects what we have done to
the brain over centuries It is a timely
topic not only because of the Wellcome
Centre’s earlier popular exhibition on
skeletons but also because of the gen-
eral surge in interest in the interior
workings of the body and particularly
of the brain, for example, the popularity
of writers such as Oliver Sacks and the
BBC’s recent airing of Dr. Geoff
Bunn’s A History of the Brain. The
developments in neuroscience in the
1990s have led to the brain being repre-
sented through functional magnetic res-
onance imaging and related imagery in
the media, but in a spectacular and
somewhat idealized way — what this
exhibition tries to do is show the organ
to which those images refer. The exhi-
bition is a visual narrative that puts
today’s neuroscience in a historical and
cultural context.

The exhibit is divided into four sec-
tions: Measuring/Classifying, Map-
ping/Modelling, Cutting/Treating and
Giving/Taking. It is especially in the
third section that you see the violence

of medicine. Marius Kwint again: “the
study of the brain has often had a sub-
text of violence, since finding out
about its workings has depended on
damage to particular areas of its other-
wise inscrutable substance. And of
course surgery is a kind of sanctioned
and controlled (and hopefully benefi-
cial) violence.” Tools for trepanning
are carefully laid out near a Bronze
Age skull with three neat holes in it. A
2012 video shows two people meticu-
lously slicing “fixed” brains at the
Brain Bank of the Imperial College of
London. There is also a display section

on electroconvulsive therapy, with the
equipment artistically arranged. Beside
the case is a video loop of a woman
calmly submitting to shock treatment.
Visitors may find her convulsions diffi-
cult to watch. 

Among drawings and replicas of the
human brain, and tools used on the
brain, there are real brains. As Kwint
explained, “what makes this collection
unique is that it has a human tissue
licence that enables us to show these
specimens, including very modern
ones.” Thus we can see a slice of Ein-
stein’s brain and think about the dubious

Corrosion cast of brain blood vessels, plastic. 

T
h
e
 G
o
rd
o
n
 M
u
se
u
m
, 
K
in
g
s 
C
o
ll
e
g
e
 L
o
n
d
o
n
.

Essay

Beauty in the complexity of the brain



Humanities

926 CMAJ, May 15, 2012, 184(8) © 2012 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors

science of looking for genius in tissue.
Helen Gardener, an American women’s
suffragist who died in 1925, argued that
a female brain was not demonstrably
different from a man’s. Her brain is on
display beside a murderer’s. Others
include diseased brains in jars, and a
brain with a bullet lodged in it.

In counterpoint to the brain samples
and tools are the drawings and artwork
throughout, some of it commissioned
for the exhibit. Ania Dabrowska’s
photo series, “After I’m Gone,”
includes a photograph of a headrest

(with three indents for different sizes)
that holds the head steady while the
brain is removed. In others, medicine
and art come together, as in surgeon
Harvey Cushing’s detailed drawing of
the head opened to expose the brain’s
gunshot wound. There are also some
interesting self portraits by patients
contemplating the post-mortem
removal of their brains.

What affected me the most was the
extraordinarily beautiful corrosion cast
of the blood vessels in the brain. To see
the brain inside out, as it were. Made
by injecting resin into the vascular sys-
tem and then corroding away the sur-
rounding tissue, the process produces a
hardened cast of the brain’s blood ves-
sels. The result is something that looks
both delicate and like a tree (dendritic). 

The first three sections of the exhibit
reveal much that is not fine in the art of
medicine: phrenology, anthropometry,
lack of patient consent, the Nazi’s
Aktion T4 program and collection of
brains. That is the context we are asked
to remember as neuroscience moves for-
ward in the study of the brain and its ail-
ments. The fourth section, Giving/Tak-
ing, helps us consider these ethical
issues by concluding with good practice.
Here we find three patients who talk
about donating their brains to science
after they die in order to contribute to
the study of Alzheimer disease. 

Absent from the exhibit were recent
discoveries about the brain, such as

brain imaging (except for a screen of a
brain “purportedly” responding to
music). I liked that the exhibition was
not dependent on oversized wall
plaques of text and had a good mix of
artefact and video. And I liked it for
showing me the brain as beautiful. 

Debra Martens MA
Writer
London, UK

For more information see
www.wellcomecollection .org/brains 
or play a free online game at
www.wellcomecollection.org/axon

CMAJ 2012. DOI:10.1503/cmaj.120593

The brain of Helen H. Gardener. 

Trepanned Bronze Age skull from Jericho,
Palestine, 2200–2000 BC. 

B
u
rt
 G
re
e
n
 W

il
d
e
r 
B
ra
in
 C
o
ll
e
ct
io
n
, 
C
o
rn
e
ll
 U
n
iv
e
rs
it
y.
 P
h
o
to
g
ra
p
h

b
y 
P
e
te
r 
R
o
ss
.

Sc
ie
n
ce
 M
u
se
u
m
, 
Lo
n
d
o
n
, 
U
K