American Anthropometric Society

The American Anthropometric Society, also known as the Brain Society,[1] was a Philadelphia-based anthropometry organization of physicians, scientists and intellectuals founded in 1889. Members agreed to donate their brains after their deaths for analysis by living members of the organization in order to correlate intelligence and other mental qualities with brain morphology.[2] The society claimed to have approximately 300 members. The last brain collected was in 1938. Notable donors to the collection included some of the top medical and scientific leaders of Philadelphia at the time and the poet Walt Whitman. Analyses of the brains in the collection showed there was no correlation between intelligence and brain size but nothing else of scientific interest. The remaining twenty-two brains from the collection are currently stored at the Wistar Institute.

  1. ^ Burrell 2003, p. 110.
  2. ^ Wright, James R. (1 May 2022). "Société Mutuelle d'Autopsie, American Anthropometric Society, and the Wilder Brain Collection". Arch Pathol Lab Med. 147 (5): 611–632. doi:10.5858/arpa.2021-0623-HP. PMID 35984433.