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Yesterday my #NationalPathologyWeek tweets looked at the place of post-mortems in #histpsych. You can probably guess that pathological research in 19th-century asylums was particularly concerned with the brain, which is today’s topic. CW Death, post-mortem procedures
Though phrenology might be the first thing many people think of when they hear “brains in the 19th century”, things were a little more complicated than that. Pathological anatomical studies of the brain were gaining ground in many scientifically-oriented asylums.
Studies of the brain aimed to identify physical lesions that might explain mental and physical symptoms, as well as map bodily functions to specific areas of the brain (cerebral localization).
To do this, though, the brain itself had to be made ‘readable’ in various ways, and this is a really interesting area re: histories of scientific practice. (This is where things get a bit detailed, so if you’re a bit squeamish you may want to stop reading now…)
Serial sectioning (literally cutting the brain tissue into thin slices) was crucial to better understanding the structure of the brain. Some practitioners used special knives for this purpose like the ‘Valentin knife’, others used razor blades.
Microtomes were also popular – a small tool that hardened and held the tissue as it was cut, making the task easier. For more on serial sectioning in the 19th century, I recommend Heini Hakosalo’s article ‘The Brain Under the Knife’ (2006).
Sectioning made it easier to examine the brain under the microscope too: if lesions on the brain couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, perhaps they could be seen through the lens? Microscopy was serious *work*: different tissues needed different stains, for instance.
A bit like the cynicism of some doctors about post-mortems, not everyone thought microscopy was all that. William Bevan Lewis reminded his staff at the West Riding Asylum that “the sense of sight and touch” was still an important method of investigation.
Both brains and other body parts might be preserved as teaching aids in asylums like the West Riding or Claybury Asylum in London. Something that surprised me when researching this was the innovations of individual pathologists in pathological/preservation work...
Edwin Goodall, at West Riding Asylum, recommended using black bicycle varnish to paint the back and sides of specimen jars to make specimens stand out better.
As well as physical specimens that were sometimes kept in ‘museum’ collections on-site, asylum staff recorded brain lesions or unusual appearances like “softening” on pre-printed diagrams, or sometimes sketched what they’d seen under the microscope.
Photography was also key. I mentioned the emotional resonances of post-mortem records yesterday, and this was especially strong in those cases where a photo of a patient’s brain appeared next to a photo of them during life.
On asylum photography more generally, I really recommend the work of @KatRawling, @beastruz, Susan Sidlauskas, Simon Cross, and @carolinebressey.
In the case of some conditions – like General Paralysis of the Insane – this juxtaposing of the clinical and pathological in photos was seen to be very important in understanding how a “mental disease” (as contemporaries would term it) might affect the body.
Tomorrow I’ll look at how General Paralysis of the Insane – a condition that received a *lot* of attention in the later 19th century – was understood and investigated from the point of admission to death.
