A very “cerebral” museum. In Lima, the capital of Peru, visitors and researchers who want to think outside the box can explore the interior of brain structures … Welcome to the brain museum, more commonly called “cerebrothèque”. This unusual place located in the heart of the Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo hospital in Lima is home to no less than 290 brains. These sights attract by less than 20,000 people each year. This is to say if these encephalic attractions are of great interest.
The Santo Toribio hospital, one of the oldest in the region, used to house the terminally ill. It has gradually become the place where one can feel, observe and learn a little more about the enigmas of the brain. The collection on display only reveals a part of the 2,912 collected over decades, but is of interest to the public and even to researchers. The brain structures shown are from patients who died from brain damage or diseases of the nervous system. At the head of this “cabinet of curiosities” is the neuropathologist Diana Rivas. It is she who selects the brains likely to have a scientific interest and therefore to enter the museum, as she explains to AFP. “Here we do the autopsies, it’s me who takes care of it”.
Brains presented from every angle
Visitors can walk through different rooms, one specializing in neuroanatomy, the other dedicated to birth defects and the third dedicated to pathologies of the nervous system such as tumors, AIDS, Zika virusor the Alzheimer’s disease.
Students and schoolchildren flock there in droves to discover, for example, the differences between healthy brains and diseased brains. “We show the students what a healthy brain looks like and then we see a sick brain, like this one who suffers from cysticercosis, the leading cause of convulsions, ”explains Diana Rivas.
A certainty emerges among visitors leaving the museum: the brain is far from having revealed all its mysteries.
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