An exhibition which features surgeons sawing through a living person’s skull had to be altered after more than a dozen visitors fainted from shock.
Heath and safety officers were called in after complaints about the Brains exhibition at Euston’s Wellcome Collection.
It features more than 150 grey matter-related artefacts, including real brains, photographs and manuscripts.
But graphic videos of a living person having their skull sawed open and instruments fitted to their brain and people being jolted with bursts of electric convulsive therapy proved too much for several visitors.
The Wellcome Collection had to wrap “screening hoods” around the video booths.
Staff are warning visitors they may feel “light-headed”. A disclaimer says the show contains “images that some may find disturbing” and is “intended for those aged 14 years and over and not recommended to those prone to fainting”.
A spokesman said: "Following a small number of faintings in our Brains exhibition we took, in consultation with Camden Council, precautionary measures to ensure visitor comfort and safety. These included temporarily removing videos featuring historical footage of medical practices until screening hoods were fitted. The videos are now running again. The exhibition remained open throughout.
"Brains is in its final week and is our most successful exhibition to date, with an increase of 20% in visitor numbers and some 100,000 people coming to see the show.
"The content of the exhibition is challenging and not suitable for all and given that many people have been coming to Wellcome Collection for the first time, we have increased the warnings as to the nature of this content.
"We are looking forward to a busy final weekend."
A spokesman for Camden council said that after “an accident notification regarding a person fainting” an environmental health officer advised staff at the collection “to implement additional control measures to warn other visitors, which they put in place.”
The show has been one of the venue’s most successful, with close to 100,000 visitors.
Among the exhibits are sections of Albert Einstein’s brain, the brain of a 19th-century murderer Edward Rulloff, that of computer pioneer Charles Babbage and a specimen containing a bullet wound.
Co-curator Lucy Shanahan said: “It’s fascinating to be confronted with actual brains. When you see one it makes you relate that to what’s going on inside your own head. It’s a fascination, if not an obsession.”
