24 January in the History of Psychology

On January 24:

1674 — The British court passed a resolution to move Bethlehem Hospital from its original location at Bishopsgate, London, to the city moat at the edge of Moorfields, later to become Finsbury Circus. The hospital survived the fire of London in 1666 but the surrounding new construction that followed the fire made its decrepit condition obvious. The new hospital was commonly called "new Bedlam."

1732 — William Tuke was born. Tuke was head of the Quaker family that founded the York Retreat in 1792. The York Retreat, located in a rural setting, provided humane institutional care of people with mental illness. Its reduced use of restraints and confinement, and therapeutic use of occupational tasks, especially farming chores, were duplicated in scores of later institutions.

1850 — Hermann Ebbinghaus was born. Ebbinghaus carried out exhaustive pioneering studies in learning and recall, using himself as the subject. He developed several measures of recall, the nonsense syllable, and curves of learning and forgetting.

1870 — William Alanson White was born. White conceived of mental illness as a social, biological, and psychological process involving the whole organism. White advanced the humane treatment of people with mental illness, promoted Freudian psychology in America and coined the term mental hygiene. He appointed the first committee of the American Psychiatric Association to study legal aspects of psychiatry.

1898 — Edward L. Thorndike delivered the first report of his experiments with escape learning in cats to the New York Academy of Sciences Section on Psychology and Anthropology. The title of his paper was "Experiments in Comparative Psychology." Thorndike's studies became classics in the study of learning.

1902 — Oskar Morgenstern was born. Morgenstern's book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), written with John von Neumann, revolutionized the study of decision making and stimulated hundreds of studies in social psychology, management, and economics on strategy, choice, negotiation, and cooperation and competition. The prisoner's dilemma game was a special focus for psychologists.

1907 — Margaret Rioch was born. Rioch was primarily an individual psychotherapist. At the National Institute of Mental Health and at Children's Hospital of Washington, DC, she conducted training programs for mental health counselors.

1921 — Soviet premier V. I. Lenin issued a decree guaranteeing Ivan Pavlov extra food and maximum housing conveniences. Pavlov refused the privileges because they would not be extended to his laboratory animals and coworkers.

1922 — Ted Landsman was born. Landsman was a nondirective counseling and clinical psychologist active in training and professional affairs. His research focused on qualities of the healthy personality. He was the first licensed psychologist in Tennessee, an honor recognizing his advocacy for the adoption of the state's psychologist licensing law.

1927 — Rogers Hornsby Wright was born. Wright has been called the "father of professional psychology" for his assertive and productive advocacy of the views of independent practitioners. He has promoted insurance coverage of psychological services, independent peer review of services, licensure laws, and legislative lobbying. APA Distinguished Professional Contribution Award, 1985.

1930 — Charles R. Schuster was born. Schuster's studies of behavioral pharmacology have changed the view of drug abuse from a disorder of the will to that of a behavior maintained and altered by basic mechanisms of operant and classical conditioning. Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1986-1992; APA Distinguished Scientific Award for the Application of Psychology, 1992.

1976 — After reports from its consultant, the Arthur D. Little Company, the APA decided not to move its Central Office operations out of Washington, DC. Austin, Texas, Charlottesville, North Carolina, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, were the possible alternative sites.

1990 — The National Institute of Mental Health Division of Basic Brain and Behavioral Sciences was created from the former Division of Basic Sciences. Seven new branches to support behavioral and neuroscientific research were formed. Stephen Koslow was the acting director.