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Article ID: CBB572122895

Working Across Species down on the Farm: Howard S. Liddell and the Development of Comparative Psychopathology, C.1923–1962 (2018)

Kirk, Robert (Author)
Ramsden, Edmund (Author)

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Volume: 40
Issue: 1
Pages: 24
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-018-0189-y

DOI: 10.1007/s40656-018-0189-y

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Animal experimentation Psychiatry Psychopathology 20th century Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich Liddell, Howard Scott

Seeking a scientific basis for understanding and treating mentalillness, and inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, American physiologists,psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1920s turned to nonhuman animals. This paperexamines how new constructs such as “experimental neurosis” emerged as tools toenable psychiatric comparison across species. From 1923 to 1962, the Cornell“Behavior Farm” was a leading interdisciplinary research center pioneering noveltechniques to experimentally study nonhuman psychopathology. Led by thepsychobiologist Howard Liddell, work at the Behavior Farm formed part of anambitious program to develop new preventative and therapeutic techniques and bringpsychiatry into closer relations with physiology and medicine. At the heart ofLiddell’s activities were a range of nonhuman animals, including pigs, sheep, goatsand dogs, each serving as a proxy for human patients. We examine how Pavlov’sconceptualization of ‘experimental neurosis’ was used by Liddell to facilitatecomparison across species and communication between researchers and clinicians. Ourclose reading of his experimental system demonstrates how unexpected animalbehaviors and emotions were transformed into experimental virtues. However, tosuccessfully translate such behaviors from the animal laboratory into the field ofhuman psychopathology, Liddell increasingly reached beyond, and, in effect,redefined, the Pavlovian method to make it compatible and compliant with anethological approach to the animal laboratory. We show how the resultant BehaviorFarm served as a productive “hybrid” place, containing elements of experiment andobservation, laboratory and field. It was through the building of close and morenaturalistic relationships with animals over extended periods of time, both normaland pathological, and within and outside of the experimental space, that Liddellcould understand, manage, and make useful the myriad behavioral complexities thatemerged from the life histories of experimental animals, the researchers who workedwith them, and their shared relationships to the wider physical and socialenvironments.

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