Translating the Latin descriptions opens a small window into the worlds these patients inhabited, hints at the suffering they must have gone through and the sometimes painful deaths they probably endured. It’s unsettling as a number of the conditions are at least manageable, if not treatable, today: Apoplexia cerebri, where a burst blood vessel or stroke would have caused a sudden malfunction of the patient’s brain; Hemorrhagic subarachnoid idle frontotemporal, a bleeding between the brain and the skull in the frontal temporal area.

The history of the Austin State Hospital is fascinating. According to historical documents, in the 1800s the grounds of the asylum were enclosed with a substantial cedar fence, and patients helped tend the fruit orchards and vegetable gardens. If you visited the grounds back then, you’d have seen patients pacing along paths cut between the stately oaks or sitting on one of the numerous benches. Some worked in the farm or shops—said to be a part of their therapy.

The men and women whose brains now sit in jars in the Animal Resources Center at the University of Texas would have experienced the ups and downs of life at ASH, specifically the turmoil that it went through in the 1960s and 1970s: the overcrowding, the experiments with different forms of treatment (from fresh air and gardening to Thorazine and electric-shock therapy). And they’d also have experienced a life effectively shut off from the outside world, in their own little town.

From the 1950s to the mid-1980s, the resident pathologist at the hospital was a man named Dr. Coleman de Chenar, and it was in the room where he performed autopsies that he began to amass a collection of brains. At the time of his death in 1985, he had around 200 specimens that he’d collected during routine autopsies on mental patients.

Space at ASH was limited, and the hospital was keen to find a new home for de Chenar’s peculiar collection. According to a story in the Houston Chronicle in 1986, the search for a new home for the collection began because ASH couldn’t legally dispose of the formaldehyde in which the brains were preserved. Linda Campbell, then-director of Clinical Support Services at ASH, told the paper that she had been overwhelmed by calls—including from six major institutions that wanted the collection. She said the specimens were a valuable research tool, offering an inside look at how diseases attack the brain.

Adam Voorhes

Harvard wanted to expand its already sizable “brain bank,” which at the time had more than 1,000 specimens but few from schizophrenic patients. “There is so much information available in those brain tissues, and so many researchers are crying out to get such tissue,” Dr. Edward D. Bird, an associate professor of neuropathology at the school, told the newspaper.When it was bequeathed to the University of Texas (UT) in 1987, the Houston Chronicle reported that UT had beaten Harvard Medical School, among other institutions, to the collection. It was described as the “battle for the brains.”