By Natasha Strydhorst
Yale’s medical library is the home—or resting place—of myriad historical specimens of brains, fetal skulls and pelvises, and anatomy dissection films. Among them is the Cushing Brain Tumor Registry, the collection that neurosurgery giant Harvey Cushing, M.D., donated to Yale upon his death in 1939. For years after, the collection remained just that—a sampling of specimens sealed away in a basement. In the 1990s, Yale’s medical students were known to embark on audacious nighttime wanderings in search of Cushing’s famed collection. Today, these and other specimens are not only displayed, but are being studied afresh and contributing, once more, to the advance of medicine. From digitizing dissection videos to advance medical education at home and abroad, to analyzing fetal skulls to map tooth development across the gestational period, the displays in “new lives for old specimens” bring historical samples into the digital age.
The curators of these historical specimens are also the architects of their new contributions. Their works are intimately collaborative affairs—of the past with the present, art with medicine, historical specimens with contemporary technology. The curators and displays made an appearance—fittingly—in the Historical Library at this year’s reunion.
Three of the curators spoke about their project of digitizing anatomy dissection videos from the 1970s, produced by the late Yale professor of anatomy, Edmund Crelin Jr., Ph.D. ’51. “We’re hoping to be able to widely distribute this,” said Charles C. Duncan, M.D., professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics. The exhibit aims to honor those who donated their bodies for dissection upon their death. “They made the decision in life that their remains should come to the university for us to learn and for us to be able to teach,” Duncan said. The project has produced over 75 6 to 8-minute videos for use by medical, physician associate, nursing, and EMS training students—many of them are also available on YouTube for public viewing. “If they want to, they can make the best use of it,” said Shanta E. Kapadia, M.B.B.S., lecturer in surgery (gross anatomy), “and I hope our students do.”
Digitizing the videos, beyond supplementing medical education at Yale, makes their contents available for wider dissemination around the world. An audience member, citing her work as a physician in Indonesia, expressed excitement about sharing the videos with her colleagues. “I can guarantee they will be so excited,” she said. “These doctors around the world are desperate for information, and so yearning for it, and are just so excited when they can get access to stuff like this.”
Other presenters discussed their work using the latest imaging technology to analyze the fetal skulls from the Kier/Conlogue collection—an anatomic sampling including fetal skulls and pelvises from diverse gestational ages. “They inhabited two drawers [in the Cushing Center] since 2010,” said Gerald J. Conlogue, M.H.S., lecturer in radiology and biomedical imaging. “But I really wanted to show that they’re not just specimens in a drawer; that there’s a lot of value… there’s a lot of data in those skulls.” The fetal samples are valuable not only to medicine researchers, but also to physical and forensic anthropologists. “It’s really very unique that there would be a collection of nearly 50 dried fetal skulls across the gestational period,” Conlogue said.
Both projects aimed not only to bring new life to historical specimens and works, but also to illuminate them for current students of medicine. “For me, that’s always the goal—inspiring students to want to learn more, to keep going, to be able to adapt to new scenarios,” said Alicia Giaimo, M.H.S., M.B.A., clinical associate professor of diagnostic imaging at Quinnipiac University. Giaimo worked alongside Conlogue to image the fetal skull collection.
The researchers shared how their collaborative projects drew in practitioners of diverse fields, building an interdisciplinary atlas of knowledge. “I used to think of myself as ridiculously self-sufficient,” said William B. Stewart, Ph.D., associate professor of surgery (gross anatomy), and section chief. However, the project led him to the conclusion that “getting a bunch of people together as a team, I think, is absolutely critical.” Stewart was one of the researchers involved with digitizing Crelin’s anatomy dissection videos.
“It took quite a few people to adapt something like this work,” Duncan said. Their collective efforts will remain on display in the Cushing Rotunda of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library until November 3, 2017.