Walt Whitman Trashed| Doug Draime I read that after his death in 1892, Walt Whitman’s brain was kept in a jar at the university of Pennsylvania, where 200 other brains were also stored. But sometime in the early 1930’s a laboratory worker accidentally dropped Walt’s gray matter on the concrete floor, and it had to be thrown away. Of all those 200 brains it was the brain of the poet that had to be disposed of. Par for the course, eh, Walt?