APA Historical Database: Selected Entries

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On July 9:

1858 — Franz Boas was born. Boas was a revolutionary figure in the study of the interaction of culture and individual behavior. He inaugurated the first American longitudinal study of growth in 1891. The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) is his most important book for psychologists.

1866 — Ivan M. Sechenov was indicted by a Russian court for the materialistic explanations of psychic phenomena contained in his book Reflexes of the Brain (1863). Frogs were used in many of Sechenov's studies, and he proposed letting a frog testify in his defense.

1903 — Lightner Witmer had his last clinical session with "Charles Gilman," the first client of the world's first psychological clinic at the University of Pennsylvania. Witmer began to treat Charles for a reading disorder in March 1896, inaugurating Witmer's pioneering methods in clinical psychology.

1934 — Herbert Jasper, at Brown University, made the first electrical tracing from the human brain at the Emma Pendleton Bradley Home in East Providence, Rhode Island. Jasper and Hallowell Davis, at Harvard University, were independently engaged in experiments on recording electrical activity in the brain at this time.

1938 — The president of Indiana University wrote to entomologist Alfred Kinsey, authorizing him to offer a course in marriage. Kinsey's famous research on sexual behavior began with interviews of students in this course.

1975 — The National Institute of Mental Health released "Behavior Modification: Perspective on a Current Issue," the government's first study on behavior modification. The report indicated success in treating phobias, compulsive behavior, and sexual dysfunction and cautioned against abuses of the legal rights of treated individuals.

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