Thomas Stoltz Harvey (October 10, 1912 – April 5, 2007) was a pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Albert Einstein in 1955. Harvey studied at Yale University as an undergraduate and later as a medical student under Dr. Harry Zimmerman. In his third year of medical school he contracted tuberculosis and was bedridden for the next year in a sanatorium, claiming it to be one of the biggest disappointments of his life.
The autopsy was conducted at Princeton Hospital, Princeton NJ, on April 18 at 8:00 am. Einstein's brain weighed 1,230 grams -well within the normal human range- which immediately dispelled the concept that intelligence and brain size were directly related. Dr. Harvey sectioned the preserved brain into 170 pieces in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, a process that took three full months to complete. Those 170 sections were then sliced in microscopic slivers and mounted onto slides and stained. There were 12 sets of slides created with hundreds of slides in each set. Harvey retained two complete sets for his own research and distributed the rest to handpicked leading pathologists of the time. No permission for the removal and preservation had been given by Einstein or his family, but when the family learned about the study, permission to proceed the study was granted as long as the results were only published in scientific journals and not sensationalised.