In the basement of the University of Southern Denmark were stacked 9479 brains, all of which were removed from the bodies of mental health patients over 4 decades until the eighties, and this kit is currently used in 4 research projects.

According to AFP, formalin was used to preserve the brain pool, which is believed to be the largest in the world. The group was distributed in large white buckets with numbers.

Psychiatric history expert Jesper Vassy Krag stated that prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren had collected them during his experimental research that began in 1945.

Stromgrin and his colleagues thought at the time that "maybe they could figure out something about where mental illness is localized." The brains were collected after autopsies were performed from psychiatric institutes throughout Denmark and permission was not taken from the deceased or their families.

Half of the psychiatric patients who died between 1945 and 1982 had their brains collected without consent (French)

Thomas Arslev, a historian of medical sciences and research consultant at Aarhus University, estimates that half of the psychiatric patients who died in Denmark between 1945 and 1982 unknowingly and without consent contributed their brains, which were converted into what became known as the Brain Disease Institute associated with the Riskov Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark.

Lack of awareness about the rights of mind patients

"These were state mental hospitals and no one outside the walls asked questions about what was going on in those institutions," said Jesper Fassi Crag, as patients' rights were not the focus of attention at the time, society believed it needed protection from these people and the law imposed sterilization of people in mental institutions between 1929 and 1967.

They had to obtain a special exemption in order to be allowed to marry until 1989. Denmark also considered the "mentally ill" a burden on society and that they would cause all sorts of problems if they were released, allowed to have children and so on.

The development of post-mortem procedures and growing awareness of patients' rights led to the cessation of further brain addition to the group in 1982. A long and heated debate ensued about what to do with it and the Danish State Ethics Council eventually decided that it should be preserved and used for scientific research. In 2018, the brains, which had long existed in Aarhus in western Denmark, were transferred to the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

In 2018 the brains that were located in Aarhus were transferred to the University of Southern Denmark in Odense (French)

Time capsule for brain diseases

Over the years, research on preserved brains has covered a wide range of diseases, including dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

Pathologist Martin Weerenfeldt-Nielsen said the debate over the brain set was "radically over, and people now see it as impressive scientific research that is very useful in learning more about mental illness".

What sets this group apart from any other in the world is that the brains collected during the first decade were untouched by modern drugs, which could be considered a time capsule of sorts for mental illness. Susanna Aznar, a neurobiologist and Parkinson's disease expert who works at a research hospital in Copenhagen, is currently using the group as part of her team's research project.

"These brains are unique in that they enable scientists to see the effects of modern treatments in those who are being treated with the treatments we have now," Aznar said, adding that patients' brains nowadays may have changed due to the different treatments they have undergone, so when we compare them with the set of preserved brains we will be able to see "if these changes are related to the type of treatments," according to Aznar.