William McDougall 1871-1938 / by Major Greenwood and May Smith.

  • Greenwood, Major, 1880-1949
Date:
[between 1900 and 1999?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: William McDougall 1871-1938 / by Major Greenwood and May Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    psychology, and the introduction of Modem Greats” gave it a place in the official curriculum. McDougalfs fertility of mind and experimental resource would have enabled him to inspire and supervise many research workers. America proved both a stimulus and a disappointment—the former because other lands and the unknown had always appealed to him, and he found there a freedom from tradition in striking contrast to the England of pre-war days, but his disappointment was great when he found many students of psychology given over to the cruder forms of Behaviourism, and suspicious of views that seemed to them old- fashioned. Accustomed, too, to the quietude of Oxford academic life, he found it difficult to adapt himself to conditions where students could ring him up at any time, to discuss their work and views. In England at that time the daily Press hardly used the word psychology, except perhaps once a year when the British Association meetings were reported; in America he found himself embroiled in a violent controversy, with an important section of the Press taking sides against him, because of a defence of inherited characteristics. Here, however, he had the opportunity to develop experimental work on much more ambitious lines than Oxford resources permitted, and he planned and carried out over a number of years his now well-known experiment, which gave support to the Lamarckian hypothesis. In 1927 he went to Duke University in North Carolina, where he continued to write and research until his death. During these years increasing deafness made life very difficult for him. He spent most of his summers in England, at Wendover, where he had bought a seventeenth-century house. Although he still felt drawn to England, there was so much that appealed to him in America that he declined the offer of Sir Walter Fletcher, who wanted him to come to the Medical Research Council, to be responsible for research on Medical Psychology. The Oxford period saw the production of his most original work, but in America he almost doubled his output of publications. Between 1921 and 1938 he published thirteen books and numerous articles. Two of the books, the Outline of Psychology,