Tales of the Unexpected: The Use of Narrative in Studies of Experimental Neurosis
Including a Symposium on Mary Morgan: Curiosity, Imagination, and Surprise
ISBN: 978-1-78756-424-4, eISBN: 978-1-78756-423-7
Publication date: 24 October 2018
Abstract
Seeking to build an objective scientific approach to psychiatry, American psychiatrists, physiologists, and psychologists began to turn to the conditional reflex method of Ivan Pavlov from the late 1920s. The generation of “neurotic” animals in the laboratory was critical to the emergence of a new experimental psychiatry in the United States. To understand the development of this field of research, the chapter will draw first on Mary Morgan’s identification of the mediatory and intermediary role of models and their ability to surprise and generate new questions, and second, upon her recent work on narratives in science. It will argue that it was through discursive and descriptive techniques that traced over time the tangled and interconnected lives of experimental subjects, that such elements of unpredictability in the animal laboratory were transformed into tools of research and put to disciplinary uses, promoting the clinical relevance of this new objective approach to psychiatric medicine.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Marcel Boumans and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and, of course, Mary Morgan for stimulating and encouraging my interest in the history of animal models and experiments in psychiatry and psychology. I am also grateful to the staff of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives for their considerable help in negotiating the Gantt archival collection at Johns Hopkins. The research for this chapter was carried out with the support of the Wellcome Trust, first through a project on the history of the dog in science and medicine, directed by Michael Worboys, at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, and then through a University Award at Queen Mary, University of London.
Citation
Ramsden, E. (2018), "Tales of the Unexpected: The Use of Narrative in Studies of Experimental Neurosis", Including a Symposium on Mary Morgan: Curiosity, Imagination, and Surprise (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 36B), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-41542018000036B010
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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