Historical approach and understanding over time

Turning historic medical collections into modern biobanks raises not only technical and scientific issues, but also connects to current debates about research ethics and the status of human remains, particularly in relation to brains removed from patients in psychiatric and geriatric hospitals. Our project puts fundamental questions in dialogue with historical and sociocultural aspects. We also plan to communicate our research findings to a wide audience, and to highlight the current challenges raised by a scientific approach that incorporates the history of its objects.

Historic collections provide a basis for a rich material and cultural history of medicine, patients and, in this case, the nosographic concepts on which the Geneva Brain Bank was originally established. We are therefore placing our questions within their deep historical context by practising an ‘exposomics over time’.

The paper documents accompanying the biological specimens enable us to explore aspects of the lives of the people whose brains were removed. We will produce biographies – anonymised in the form of ‘composite’ profiles – by cross-referencing this information with the clinical scientific data obtained from the other modules, with the aim of producing a historicised, intellectual, human and contextualised response to the questions raised by reusing historic human specimens.