Central State Hospital

The Central State Hospital houses a medical history museum in the old pathology building with nineteen rooms filled with medical equipment and scientific instruments from the 1890s. The facility displays operating rooms, laboratories and a lecture hall in their original late nineteenth-century condition.

The institution was founded in 1848 as Indiana's first mental health facility and treated 792 patients by 1870. The pathology building was constructed in the late nineteenth century to advance scientific research into mental illness.

Staff and medical students gathered in the 150-seat amphitheater to observe dissections and attend lectures on mental health treatments. The building served as a space for medical education and scientific exchange about psychiatric methods.

The museum opens only by appointment for groups of up to eight people, with larger groups requiring three weeks advance planning. Most rooms are on the ground floor, though some are located on upper levels.

A medicinal plant garden grows beside the main building with specimens used in nineteenth-century medical treatments. The plants show how doctors once derived remedies from nature before factory-made medicines became available.