The ramp leading into the Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry at the Yale School of Medicine lights up as it detects motion, illuminating the way one step at a time. Above the ramp hangs a black-and-white sketch of pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, whose personal collection of brain specimens was donated to Yale upon his death in 1939. In the sketch, Cushing looks into the distance, as all visionaries do. Tacked to the side of Cushing’s portrait is a smaller illustration of his assistant, Louise Eisenhardt. After looking up from her book to make eye contact with you, she vanishes from the exhibition.
This year marks nearly 125 years since Cushing began his monumental collection of brain specimens in 1902. Cushing was one of the first neurosurgeons in America and helped lower the mortality rate of brain surgeries from 80 to 8 percent over the course of his career. Through the Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry, which opened in 2010, his name has resurfaced in national headlines and medical breakthroughs multiple times.
But many Yale students are drawn to the exhibition out of morbid curiosity rather than scientific interest; for Yale medical students in the 1990s, breaking into his collection was a rite of passage. It is not hard to see why: the Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry displays rows and rows of unidentifiable brains, pickling in jars. Some of the brains have sunk to the bottom, while others bob in a brown liquid. Blackened veins grip the organs in a chokehold; shadows move across them like ghosts. Each organ is tagged with Eisenhardt’s neat handwriting: meningioma, bursting fracture of skull, middle meningeal extradural hemorrhage.
Toward the entrance, an expository film plays through a slideshow of photos, over which two unseen speakers narrate the history of neurosurgery. One voice identifies itself as Harvey Cushing’s. The other reprimands Cushing for writing medical reports that broke convention: “I’m sorry, Dr. Cushing, I’ll have to ask you to fill in the blanks and write on the regular cards.” The tone is not reprimanding, but winks at you that the stage has been set: the human brain as uncharted waters, Cushing as captain of the ship.
In the film, Cushing’s voice quips back: “No, I’m sorry. The reason 90 percent of my patients have lived is simply because of the complete case histories.” The film flashes a photo of Cushing operating on a brain tumor. Neurosurgery at the time was a daring procedure with a 50 percent mortality rate, but Cushing’s voice already knows victory. After a successful procedure, the patient can be heard speaking to Cushing in wonder—“Can I shake your hand?”—as the orchestral music sweeps through the film like a dream.
Louse Eisenhardt, who collected these “case histories,” is but a specter in the film.
Eisenhardt was Cushing’s editorial assistant. Forming personal relationships with his patients, she documented their “life expectancies after operations for intracranial tumors” in more-than-clinical terms.
She has written in detail about one patient: In good health—has 2 children. Has a burning desire to become a nurse after her hospital stay and so she became a registered nurse and loves her profession. At a time when having an intracranial tumor was considered a “death sentence,” an article clip included with the exhibition calls Eisenhardt’s work one of “hope.”
“If it was not for Eisenhardt’s very careful collection, preservation, and diagnoses, I don’t think we would’ve gotten this collection—which, to some people, is like a work of art,” one professor at the Yale School of Medicine told me. She stressed that she and others in her department cannot remember Cushing’s brain collection without thinking about Eisenhardt. Yet in the exhibition, mention of Eisenhardt is minimal.
I thought nothing would cut closer to the bone of objective truth than a scientific exhibition, but in this way and in others, the exhibition tells a constructed story. The exhibition does not shy away from this fact but leans to it: “You get the impression that [scientists] are indulging in something like poetic license—to make the story more vivid, to make it fit in with their imagination,” observes another article clip displayed along the collection.
Perhaps part of the point of the exhibition is that “facts” about something as uncharted as the brain are at least partly fictionalized. Beneath Cushing’s brain jars are his findings of his patients, which show how subjective the very distinction between “subjective” and “objective” can be.
Subjective finding: feeling of pressure in head for 20 years. Objective finding: changes in the skeletal configuration.
Subjective finding: vomiting during the past 6 months. Objective finding: coarseness of features, especially nose.
But embracing fact as naturally fictionalized has different consequences for brains and women. Much like what happens with brains, Eisenhardt’s relative absence from the exhibition has allowed outside speculation to shape her legacy—including at the Yale School of Medicine, where Cushing began and ended his career.
At a faculty meeting on hanging Eisenhardt’s portrait in the Yale School of Medicine auditorium, a professor—who wishes to remain unnamed—recalls that an older professor had asked: did you know that Eisenhardt was Cushing’s lover? “There were a lot of people in that meeting,” she said. “And we didn’t know. And there’s no way to, like, verify it—right?”
While emphasizing Eisenhardt’s importance in preserving the brain collection, this professor acknowledged that, given the limited opportunities available to women at the time, Eisenhardt’s work may not have survived without her association with Cushing. She asked me: “If you were a talented, ambitious woman at that time, how would you make sure your work had a legacy?”
Objective finding: After Cushing’s death, according to an article displayed alongside the exhibition, Eisenhardt approached his body to snip off a lock of his hair—then “silently vanished.”
But did Eisenhardt vanish? The exhibit answers: “her records form the very soul of the registry.” Her handwriting is everywhere.
