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VOICES FROM THE PAST |
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Manon Parry, MA, MSc, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bldg 38, Room 1E 21, Bethesda, MD 20894 (e-mail: parrym{at}mail.nlm.nih.gov).
G. STANLEY HALL WAS instrumental in founding psychology as a science and in its development as a profession. He is best known for his work on child development, especially adolescence, yet he also wrote a powerful treatise on the economic, social, and intellectual isolation of the elderly. Senescence, excerpted here, was the first major analysis by an American social scientist of the changing experience of aging.1
Granville Stanley Hall was born on his parents’ farm in Ashfield, Mass, on February 1, 1844. His father, Granville Bascom Hall, served in the Massachusetts legislature, and his mother, Abigail Beals, studied at the Albany Female Seminary and taught school. They passed on to their son their love of learning as well as a strong sense of religious piety, and Hall grew up determined to make a contribution to the world. He initially planned to become a minister.2
Hall graduated from Williams College in 1867 and enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City the same year. He completed his training in 1870, although after 10 weeks as a church pastor he decided to leave the ministry. From 1872 to 1876, Hall taught literature and philosophy at Antioch College. He then undertook research with H. P. Bowditch at Harvard Medical School and in 1878 was awarded the first PhD in psychology in the United States.
After failing to secure a professorship, Hall went to Germany, where he studied physiological psychology at laboratories in Berlin and Leipzig. He also spent time investigating the possibilities of applying psychology to education. He returned to the United States in 1880 and was invited by Harvard to give a series of public lectures on education. The lectures were so successful that he repeated the series the following year and was invited to deliver a similar series at Johns Hopkins University in 1881.
In 1882 Hall was appointed a lecturer in psychology and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University, becoming a professor in 1884. This professorship was the first chair in the new field of psychology in the country. Hall was a major force in organizing the field, focusing on scientific approaches and in 1883 establishing a psychology laboratory at the university.3 In 1887 he launched the American Journal of Psychology, and in 1892 he convened the American Psychological Association and served as its first president.
In 1888, Hall became the first president of Clark University, in Worcester, Mass. He envisioned Clark as a major graduate school and invited a number of leading scholars to join the faculty, including anthropologist Franz Boas and biologist C. O. Whitman. The accidental asphyxiation of Hall’s wife and daughter in 1890 left him raising his young son alone,4 yet over the course of the next decade he made some of his most significant contributions to the new science of psychology. He developed his influential concept of "genetic psychology," based on evolutionary theory, and solidified his reputation as a leading educational reformer.
In 1904, Hall published Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. In this 2-volume study, based on the idea that child development recapitulates human evolution, Hall took on a variety of issues and synthesized scholarship from a wide range of disciplines. After his retirement in 1920, Hall wrote a companion volume on aging. This important account has been labeled "prophetic" in its recognition of an emerging "crisis of aging" in the 20th century, in which longer lifespan, narrowing family roles, and expulsion from the workforce combined to dramatically isolate the elderly and restrict their active participation in public life.1 Hall railed against this process, arguing that the wisdom conferred by old age meant that the elderly had valuable and creative contributions to make to society. Yet, the stigma of aging meant that, instead, many were engaged in the foolish pursuit of youth, trying to avoid being excluded from full participation in their communities. In the conclusion of the book, Hall expressed a tangible sense of personal anger against this form of discrimination.5 His stirring call for a better understanding of the aging process anticipated the development of gerontology, and his critique of the marginalization of the elderly still resonates today.
Accepted for publication March 15, 2006.
References
1. Cole TR. The prophecy of Senescence: G. Stanley Hall and the reconstruction of old age in America. Gerontologist. 1984;24:360–366.[ISI][Medline]
2. Hulse SH, Green BF Jr. One Hundred Years of Psychological Research in America: G. Stanley Hall and the Johns Hopkins Tradition. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1986:4.
3. Ross D. Granville Stanley Hall. In: Garraty JA, Carnes MC, eds. American National Biography. Vol 9. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 1999:857–858.
4. Ross D. G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press; 1972:208.
5. Woodward K. Against wisdom: the social politics of anger and aging. J Aging Stud. 2003;17:55–67.[CrossRef]
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