When his patients died in surgery, Dr. Harvey Cushing kept the brains. When his patients survived, he took pictures.
When I first walk into the Cushing Collection in the basement of the Yale Medical School Library, I only see the brains: jars and jars of them, each container bigger than a human head, their contents floating in clear, red, or yellowish liquid, unmoving and unaging, sliced, cubed, whole, partial. It’s like a gruesome deli. Nobody mans the collection’s visits.; instead, the invisible hand of Yale Facilities bestows swipe access onto you.
Cushing is considered the first neurosurgeon; with no MRIs, Cushing’s only way of bettering his surgeries was by studying his failures; he tore his subjects’ brains apart postmortem. He labeled all the specimens with the patients’ names and their conditions: Meningioma; Glioblastoma; Intracranial tumor.. I left the collection wondering why anyone would keep those jars, so I set up a call with the coordinator of the collection, Terry Dagradi. Within a few sentences of our conversation, she begins to list the collection’s artistic and historical merits, including the handwritten labeling on each jar. She also assures me the labels are HIPAA-compliant.
“There’s nothing wrong with not knowing what attracts you to something,” she says. “Some people like possums and some people just wanna smush ‘em.” It’s the same with the brains. But the collection isn’t just the specimens. Terry estimates there are also between ten and fifteen thousand glass-plate photographs in the Cushing Collection. She works as a photographer at the Yale Medical School, and because of her expertise in early twentieth-century photography techniques, she led the development of the collection’s negatives. These negatives preserved the photos on thin sheets of glass. Stored for decades in basement filing cabinets, the negatives kept remarkably well, ready for printing for the exhibit. Even though she’s in charge of the photos, Terry assumes people mostly come for the brains.
While I don’t want to smush the brains, exactly, I’m not precisely dying to see more of them. I’m a queasy person. When I was eleven, I broke out of a doctor’s grip and ran out of his office to escape giving a blood sample. Now, my skin prickles, partly because of the rattling A/C and partly because my stomach feels like it’s back at the doctor’s office. I’m interested in people, not pickled body parts. Also, I prefer life to death. I look around for anything that doesn’t float and is not labeled in Latin. My eyes wander away from the brains on shelves at eye-level, down to the photographs, embedded in glass displays at waist height.
Here is one: A man in linen pants, shirtless. It is unclear where his tumor is because only his torso is pictured. What is clear is a cross necklace, glittering against his neck. Cold metal on warm skin.
I soon find myself looking at a case displaying thank-you notes. Some might say that Cushing has a bit of a fan club; someone named Ismael Miller scribbled on a yellowing postcard with a photo of Cushing on it that he came to visit the collection “because Harvey Cushing is my life! The reason I chose to go into medicine.” Avoiding the brains, my eyes wander to the rest of the items that chart Cushing’s life. A sketch of a brain reveals Cushing’s passion for drawing. A couple of dirty baseballs, preserved and put on stands, showcase his athleticism. And I learn that Cushing operated with a cutting-edge electrosurgical device to minimize bleeding. I come to know this because he used the device to sign a piece of raw meat, photographed here. It’s meant to be charming in this context, but it makes me think about blood and baby cows. The fan club really wants me to join, but I’m not convinced by the Cushing propaganda.
Another photo. In this one, Cushing conducts his two-thousandth operation, one hand plunged into a patient’s head. He rummages about. A human head from this angle looks chunky and unrecognizable: flaps of skin and slices of bone torn up and moved out of the way. This operation has smeared Cushing’s otherwise all-white outfit. One can never see the faces of patients in photos of Cushing’s operations; they’re just anonymous, skull-less. The photo is in very shallow focus, abstracting the background, so the patient’s body recedes into blurry white oblivion.
Cushing viewed healing as a sign of accomplishment, Terry says. This is why he photographed: to document his success. The pictures aren’t meant to be artistic, just archival. Still, I see a photo of a seated woman’s back that looks like a nude in an art museum. Her skin glows and looks tactile. Most of the photos in the collection have this quality: human skin, lit from within, as though you could touch it and it would be warm, like a cheek. People’s eyes glisten. Their expressions tighten as though they are about to say something. I get ready to listen.
One more. An infant boy stares straight at the camera, a fist-sized growth on the right side of his head. Hands, four of them, stretch around his neck to adjust him, or to hold him down. His face is in the center of the frame, and I can’t read his expression. Right beside him in the exhibit, there is a photo of a skull on a pedestal. It occupies the same space in the frame as the little boy’s face. I shiver, and not because of the A/C.
The process of photography back in the 1910s was arduous. Terry talks about what it would have been like to sit for the photos: “It’s awkward, it’s a little scary, they don’t know what they’re seeing.” The subjects had to figure out what their diagnoses meant while sitting still for five minutes in front of a bulky, alien camera stamping them onto a glass sheet for posterity. I imagine they don’t know what they’re seeing as they watch me, decidedly modern in my polyester cargo pants and AirPods. Still, I can’t shake the urge to talk to them.
Whatever Cushing meant for the photos to be, his subjects’ gazes burrow through the years. This is what draws me to the photos: the immediacy of the moments captured; the life in the patients’ eyes preserved. When I look at them, I feel lucky—and a little guilty—that I get to be alive too, and so sure of it.
Eventually, I break eye contact. I make my exit from the collection swiftly; I have a call to make. Before I go, I look at the brains. My neck prickles. The photos look at me back.
