Indiana Medical History Museum: The Asylum's Pathology Lab That Time Preserved
Near Indianapolis, Indiana
On West Vermont Street in Indianapolis, on the grounds of what was once the Central State Hospital for the Insane, stands a building that has been called the oldest surviving pathology facility in the United States. It is not large. But almost nothing inside has changed since eighteen ninety-five.
The building was designed by architect Adolf Scherrer and constructed that year at the direction of hospital superintendent George Edenharter, who wanted to bring rigorous scientific research to the treatment of mental illness. At the time, this was a genuinely progressive idea. The standard treatment for psychiatric patients in most American institutions was custodial: keep them housed, keep them from harming others, and wait. Edenharter believed that mental illness had physical causes that could be identified and eventually treated, and that the only way to learn was to look.
The pathology building he built contained everything needed to do that work: a one-hundred-fifty-seat amphitheater for teaching and demonstration, an autopsy room, three clinical laboratories, a medical library, an anatomical museum, and a photography laboratory. Doctors could study brain tissue under microscopes, photograph specimens, and lecture medical students in the same facility. For the era, it was a state-of-the-art medical research center.
The Central State Hospital operated for nearly a century before closing in nineteen ninety-four as the deinstitutionalization movement transformed American psychiatric care. Most of the campus was demolished or repurposed. But the old pathology building survived, and in nineteen sixty-nine, the Indiana Medical History Museum was established within its walls. Since nineteen eighty-four, the museum has been open to the public.
What visitors find inside is a nearly intact Victorian-era medical facility: original glass specimen jars still on shelves, autopsy tables in place, the amphitheater seats arranged as they were a hundred and thirty years ago. It is one of the few places in the country where the physical environment of nineteenth-century medical science is still fully visible.
