“Are you SURE you need me to drop you off right here?” the Uber driver stated as she turned left onto the highway to the abandoned-looking grounds of the previous Central State Hospital close to the west facet of Indianapolis.
“This doesn’t look proper.”
However that’s precisely the place had been wished to be.
Central State Hospital, which opened in 1848, was initially often known as the “Indiana Hospital for the Insane,” and the grounds sprawled throughout 160 acres. In the course of the 150 years the hospital was open, folks recognized with every thing from schizophrenia, melancholy (melancholia), and hysteria to alcoholism, and epilepsy had been sufferers right here.
The hospital’s Pathology Division constructing, which first opened in 1896 for the aim of learning the circumstances of the hospital sufferers, is now the Indiana Medical History Museum.
It’s additionally the oldest surviving pathology facility within the nation. It’s on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations. And it nonetheless has a lot of its scientifically geared up inside intact.
We joined a tour that made stops within the instructing amphitheater, varied laboratories, the library, the post-mortem room, and the early-day anatomical museum which homes preserved specimens–principally brains, organized by pathology.
Listed below are some extra pictures from the museum.
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