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1794 — The legislature of New Jersey passed "An Act for Supporting Idiots and Lunatics and Preserving Their Estates." This early public policy regarding care of people with mental illness was more concerned with care of their property than with care of the individuals themselves.
1823 — The first lectures in Britain on mental illness were begun by Sir Alexander Morison. Morison delivered a series of nine lectures to an audience of six people at Edinburgh and based his lectures on several visits to Jean Esquirol in Paris. Morison became physician to Bethlehem Hospital in 1835 and remained there until 1853. His lecture series was delivered in Edinburgh, and later in London, for 30 years.
1848 — The first state mental hospital in Indiana, the Indiana Hospital for the Insane, in Indianapolis, admitted its first patients. The legislature provided land for the hospital on January 13, 1845 and provided building funds on January 19, 1846. The name of the institution was changed on March 3, 1927 to Central State Hospital. This hospital closed in 1994 and patients were transferred to Larue D. Carter Memorial Hospital, also in Indianapolis.
1875 — Knight Dunlap was born. Dunlap's experimental work focused on visual perception, abnormal and social psychology, and the psychology of religion. His theoretical positions insisted on a psychology of observable responses that did not rely on introspection or instinct for data or explanation. APA President, 1922.
1883 — James McKeen Cattell reported for his first day of work gathering data in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory.
1936 — An article in the New York Times reported the prefrontal lobotomies performed by Walter Freeman and James Watts, the first in the United States. The headline read "Find New Surgery Aids Mental Cases."
1958 — The drug Trancopal (chlormezanone; Winthrop Breon) was approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Chlormezanone is used as an antianxiety medication.
1969 — The APA journal Professional Psychology was first published. The journal began as a joint project of the APA and APA Division 12 (Clinical Psychology), with Donald K. Freedheim as the editor. The title of the journal became Professional Psychology: Research and Practice in 1983. Norman Abeles was the new editor at that time.
1990 — Jacob Cohen's article "What I Have Learned (So Far)" was published in the American Psychologist. The article contains practical statistical advice and was frequently cited in other publications.
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