Ghost Stories

First-year Yale medical student Christopher Wahl heard the stories in the dorm just like all the first-year students had for years. A spooky legend about hundreds of brains stored in bottles in the dorm’s basement. But unlike the thousands that came before him, Wahl decided to check — and found the stories were true. “I could just see telling my parents I got thrown out of medical school for this,” Wahl remembers. But “no one really asked, What were you doing skulking around the bottom of the dorm?’” The archives contained not only brains, but photographs and 50,000 pages of records of Dr. Harvey Cushing, a pioneer in neurosurgery at Harvard who finished his career at Yale. Wahl took a year off to catalog the extensive find; Cushing died in 1939. “It’s fun for me just because there are generations of physicians who never knew the brains were down there,” Wahl said. (AP) ...I can see the headline in the Harvard Crimson now: “Yalies Claim They Didn’t Know They Had Brains”.