Porencephaly: CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

Porencephaly, from Percival Bailey Brain Specimens Collection (University of Illinois at Chicago) in CARLI Digital Collections

BRAAAINS!!!

Sorry, couldn’t resist a little Halloween zombie humor. But seriously, folks: This digital collection of images from “Percival Bailey's UIC Neuropathology Collection of Plastic Embedded, Whole-mount, Preserved Brain Specimens” is for neither the squeamish nor the morbidly empathetic.

Mind processes image: A brain. Your initial reaction to what’s before your eyes (something resembling a slice of meaty mushroom, albeit a diseased one) is visceral. You distance yourself from the macabre by searching for beauty in the form objectively—reducing it to shape, composition, color.

Then you notice what lies behind the other side of the encasement: A medical history. Suddenly you realize how awfully intimate this is. This thing you’re seeing used to be inside another living being. Although the text, partly smudged under plastic, omits nearly all data personally identifying the porencephalic patient, you learn that this anonymous young woman died in 1956 at age 25, just shy of her 26th birthday. You become conscious, if only for a moment, of your own mortality.

And what of the man who collected these tissue specimens? We know his name: Percival Sylvester Bailey. He—“Ves” (for Sylvester), Percy, Mr. Neurology—was an avid scientist of all things neuro; professionally outspoken, intellectually anti-Freudian, socially raconteurial. Just a boy from Little Egypt who grew up to co-author, at age 34, an important early classification scheme for brain tumors, published under the simple title A Classification of the Tumors of the Gliola Group on a Histogenetic Basis with a Correlated Study of Prognosis.

Dr. Bailey died in 1973 at age 81. (I wonder what happened to his brain.)

Written by Ellen K. Corrigan, Assistant Professor, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

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