Photograph by Brian Richwine

The former Central State Hospital is now the Indiana Medical History Museum. The Indianapolis facility was a leader in mental health care in the early 1900s.

Indianapolis is home to an extraordinary, off-the-beaten-path museum on the grounds of what was once Central State Hospital - the city's sprawling Victorian-era institution for the mentally ill. The Indiana Medical History Museum (IMHM) is the site of what functioned as the hospital's pathology unit for decades.

In an effort to reverse the inertia of deeply entrenched beliefs and mores regarding 19th-century psychiatry, Dr. George Edenharter, visionary and Central State superintendent from 1894 to 1923, established the pathology building in 1895.

"Dr. Edenharter was very aware that science was the wave of the future for psychiatric care," explained IMHM executive director Virginia Terpening. "The plan was to use the science and laboratory method and other means to try and figure out the causes of mental illness. This was very much 20th-century, cutting-edge psychiatry."

Museum visitors can see the exquisitely preserved technical tools Terpening refers to, all of which enabled Edenharter and his vanguard of similarly forward-thinking medical practitioners to engage in some of the most advanced scientific inquiry of their time.

Three laboratories - bacteriology, chemistry and histology - with their finely crafted woodwork, tile and copper fixtures, and islands and drawers spilling over with antiquated microscopes, glass bottles, beakers and other artifacts - seem less a ghoulish slice of memento mori and more a snapshot of a time when scientific revelations about life and the diseases that shortened it were unfolding at a freight-train pace.

Even the autopsy room, with its sleek simplicity and sparkling, chromatic surfaces, belies the macabre theatrics that played out there roughly 1,400 times in a 60-year period. And the room referred to as the anatomical museum is actually aesthetically breathtaking, once you get past the fact that those jars resting behind glass and wood cabinets contain human brains riddled with various physiological pathologies, and that the headless skeletons dangling side by side like ancient friends, are not Halloween decorations, but the real thing.

Terpening says that when she came onboard nearly eight years ago, she never had a sense of "spooky or creepy." Rather, she was taken with the museum because "it was so remarkably intact and preserved." While many have credited Max Bahr, who succeeded Edenharter as superintendent, and chief pathologist Walter Bruetsch with keeping the building in its relatively unspoiled condition, Terpening offers a slightly more pragmatic spin.

"It's strictly a guess, but what I tell people is that Bruetsch liked the Old-World look," she said. "The other thing I tell people is that Bahr and Bruetsch didn't so much preserve, they just didn't throw out."

The amphitheater, in all its early 20th-century state-of-the-art elegance, is a perfect example of the historical intactness Terpening found so irresistible. The original skylight illuminates the spacious lecture hall, lending a sacred quality to a spacious room where decades of decidedly secular activities transpired. Ascending rows of white oak chairs remain frozen in time, the seats' cane bottoms sagging slightly from years of students sitting in them, minds focused on the riveting lectures, autopsies and other teaching exercises.

Under the capable direction of Terpening, the amphitheater is the site of contemporary educational events as well. Though on paper the pathology building has been a museum since 1969, it was largely an esoteric enterprise until the 1990s, and became even more accessible when Terpening assumed leadership in January 2000. That's when activity really began to pick up for the museum.

"We have far more public programming throughout the year and have expanded what we do to include health careers," the director said. "There's a strong curriculum element for high school students. We do a ton of programs for youth from about third grade on, including pioneer and civil war medicine, and presentations on mental health for high school kids."

Another development at the museum during Terpening's tenure is the apothecary garden, which was created and is maintained by the Purdue Master Gardeners of Marion County. Over 50 medicinal plants are in the garden adjacent to the museum, and a photo exhibit called Rustic Remedies: Cures from Granny's Garden, featuring stunning close-ups of the plants at their springtime best, is on display on the museum's second floor.

Terpening and her staff are particularly giddy these days about a 1950s family physician's office exhibit that opened in a separate building immediately south of the museum in 2005.

"It takes a look at medicine and an authentic family doctor's office at the middle of the 20th century in the middle of the country," Terpening said. The exhibit was deemed so authentic a treasure that it won the 2007 Outstanding Programming Award from the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Terpening also seems intent on making the museum accessible to the historically economically segregated neighborhoods that surround it. And she would like to see more folks from other areas experience the jewel that is the Indiana Medical History Museum.

"It's not just folks with health care backgrounds," she said. "We see people from all kinds of backgrounds, and hope that we continue to do so."

Lori Canada can be reached at locanada30@yahoo.com.

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Indiana Medical History Museum