Indiana Medical History Museum

The Indiana Medical History Museum is located on the grounds of the former Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane.  The building used to house the hospital's Pathology Department--when the building was constructed in 1896, Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane was only the second mental hospital in the US to have a separate building dedicated to Pathology (the first was Bellevue).  Notably, it is the last such building that still exists.  The name of the museum is a bit misleading: the museum is not concerned with healing so much as what a state of the art pathology laboratory looked like in the early years after Louis Pasteur's discoveries.  The building remains in remarkable shape due to the fact that its labs were little used after the 1920s and 30s, and the building was never repurposed.  The museum seems little visited, but its hard to see why.  There's an autopsy room that will appeal to the macabre sensibilities of kids and adults, a cabinet in one of the labs bears the scars of an exploding bottle of acid, a museum contains scores of brains in formaldehyde, and more seriously, anyone interested in science will find interesting insights into the evolution of laboratory science.

Indiana Medical History Museum	Indiana Medical History Museum	Amphiteater--lectures and occasional autopsies were performed here.	The refrigerator for bodies awaiting autopsy. Before the refrigerator was available, bodies were kept on ice in an adjacent building.

Getting there:

by car: From downtown, take Michigan Street west through the IUPUI campus.  Turn left on Warman (just over the railroad tracks) and then right on Vermont.  The museum entrance will be on your left.

by bike: Same as by car, but be careful on Michigan Street.

Costs:

$5 adults

$3 college students with ID

$1 students 6-18

free under 6

 

Open Thursday through Saturday 10-4 (last tour at 3:15), Wednesday by appointment.

Links:

Indiana Medical History Museum