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On October 19:
1775 — A Swedish royal ordinance directed that "Crown hospitals," which operated primarily as homeless shelters, would have as their sole mission the care of people with mental illness and seriously ill people. This was the first official provision for mental hospitals in Sweden.
1828 — The first clear relationship between epilepsy and a local cortical lesion was provided by Richard Bright, a physician at Guy's Hospital, London. While Bright provided many cases as evidence, his conclusion was not generally accepted until the works of Hughlings Jackson were published, beginning in 1863.
1871 — Walter B. Cannon was born. His area of concentration was the physiology of emotion. Cannon's theories, later elaborated by Philip Bard, were first thoroughly treated in Cannon's book Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage (1915). Cannon was head of the Department of Physiology at Harvard University from 1906 to 1940.
1891 — Lois Meek Stolz was born. Stoltz was a developmental psychologist interested in early childhood education. She was a founder and first president of the National Association for Nursery Education (1929). At the time, there were only 80 nursery schools in the United States. She later helped to establish the Oakland Growth Study and developed indexes of adolescent growth.
1927 — Carrie Buck, a resident at a mental hospital, was sterilized in an operation by J. H. Bell at the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded in Lynchburg, Virginia. The legal protest over eugenic sterilization had been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1950 — Erik H. Erikson's Childhood and Society was published.
1961 — Georg von Békésy won the Nobel prize for his studies of the physiology of hearing. He provided evidence for the traveling wave theory of pitch perception.
1984 — Congress established the U.S. Institute of Peace. Ironically, the legislation was made a part of the Department of Defense Authorization Act to prevent a veto by President Reagan. The institute was a longtime interest of Senator Jennings Randolph (D-WV) and promotes study of negotiation, conflict resolution, and relations between persons and nations.