Denmark University Holds World's Largest Collection Of Brains For Scientific Research Into Mental Illness

The brains were collected after performing autopsies on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark.

The Denmark University of Odense is said to have the world's largest collection of human brains. Countless shelves line the walls of one of the basements of the university that holds 9,479 human brains assembled over 37 years, for research purposes. All the brains have been removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s, reported news agency AFP.

The organs are preserved in formalin in large white buckets labelled with numbers. The collection was started in 1945 by  prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren for "experimental research", said Jesper Vaczy Kragh, an expert in the history of psychiatry to AFP.

The brains were collected after performing autopsies on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark.

No permission was sought from either the deceased or their family member, AFP reported.

"These were state mental hospitals and there were no people from the outside who were asking questions about what went on in these state institutions," said Kragh.

Poeple having mental illness were considered "a burden to society (and believed that) if we let them have children, if we let them loose... they will cause all kinds of trouble," the expert further said.

Up until 1989, they had to get a special exemption in order to be allowed to marry.

New additions to the collection ended in 1982, after evolution of post-mortem procedures and growing awareness of patients' rights.

A long and heated debate then ensued on what to do with it. Denmark's state ethics council ultimately ruled it should be preserved and used for scientific research, according to AFP.

The collection was kept in Aarhus in western Denmark and moved to the current location in Odense in 2018.