Psychological Effects of Alcohol: An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Moderate Doses of Ethyl Alcohol on a Related Group of Neuro-Muscular Processes in Man (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Psychological Effects of Alcohol: An Experim...)
Excerpt from Psychological Effects of Alcohol: An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Moderate Doses of Ethyl Alcohol on a Related Group of Neuro-Muscular Processes in Man
Appendix I - Tentative plan of investigation on physiological and psychological efl'ccts of alcohol on man appendix li. - Family and personal histories of the subjects.
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Raymond Dodge was an American experimental psychologist.
Background
Dodge was born on February 20, 1871 in Woburn, Massachusetts, the second of two sons of George Smith Dodge, a native of Vermont, and Anna (Pickering) Dodge. Ten years younger than his brother, he was close to his father, an apothecary who took a Harvard M. D. in middle life but failed to establish a successful practice and instead became a Congregational minister. The son, although intrigued by his father's library of medical and philosophical books, found his greatest satisfaction in the workshop in the rear of the drugstore, where good tools were available; and there he probably first developed the interest and the skills which determined the direction of his later scientific achievement.
Education
Dodge's serious introduction to philosophy began as a freshman at Williams College, and his absorption in philosophical problems continued throughout his life. He received the A. B. degree at Williams in 1893. Minimal family resources forced him to earn his own way at college and after graduation to accept employment as assistant librarian at Williams in order to finance a start on work for the doctorate. A combination of circumstances led him to the University of Halle to study under Benno Erdmann. His two years of study in Germany were years of dire poverty, which left scars on his social attitudes, but there were the compensations of stimulating associations and a devoted attachment to Erdmann that endured until the latter's death in 1921. It was during Dodge's early days at Halle that a need expressed by Erdmann in connection with study of the reading process led the young American to the explorations which resulted in the invention of the Erdmann-Dodge tachistoscope and marked his transition from philosophy to the emerging field of psychology. He was awarded the Ph. D. degree in 1896, and his dissertation, Die motorischen Wortvorstellungen, was published that year.
Career
After a year of teaching at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, Dodge was in 1898 appointed to the faculty of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. There he remained for twenty-six happy and productive years with only three interruptions: a sabbatical year in 1909-1910, part of which he spent studying with the physicist-engineer Lucien Bull at the Marey Institute in Paris and part with the physiologist Max Verworn at Göttingen; a year (1913-1914) as psychologist in a program studying the psychomotor effects of alcohol at the Nutrition Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution; and some months during 1918 as consultant to the navy on training matters. The instruments he devised for the training of gun pointers and for the detection of submarines were widely used.
Dodge devoted many months to assisting in its promotion and planning, and in 1924 he reluctantly severed his ties with Wesleyan and accepted appointment as professor of psychology at Yale. Dodge, Robert M. Yerkes, and Clark Wissler constituted the first directorate of the Institute, which five years later was broadened to include psychiatry and became the Institute of Human Relations. Dodge remained at Yale until his retirement in 1936, continuing his productivity despite the increasing disabilities of Parkinson's disease and serving as an invaluable source of ideas and guidance for the research of many colleagues and students.
During his years at Wesleyan his advice was constantly sought by the administration and by his peers on the faculty. He was a popularteacher both in the undergraduate classroom and the graduate seminar. To a later generation Dodge's name is not well known, for he made no great contributions to psychological theory. The invention of the Erdmann-Dodge tachistoscope and the ensuing experiments on reading, culminating in the pioneering and classic monograph by Dodge and Erdmann, Psychologische Untersuchungen über das Lesen (1898); the corneal reflection and concave mirror techniques for the photographic registration of eye movements, and the subsequent descriptive classification of the types of eye movements and their study under a variety of psychophysiological conditions; the rotating apparatus for the investigation of vestibular experience and ocular nystagmus; his wartime instruments for the navy: all remain landmarks in the annals of experimental psychology.
Significant contributions to the development of theory lie in Dodge's "A Working Hypothesis for Inner Psychophysics, " published in the Psychological Review in 1911; in his "Theories of Inhibition, " appearing in the same journal in 1926; and in his book Conditions and Consequences of Human Variability (1931). It is the phenomenon of human variability that constitutes the theme which interrelates his many widely ranging research investigations and publications.
After retirement he lived in Tryon, North Carolina, where he died of pneumonia on April 8, 1942.
Achievements
Dodge invented an instrument to test, select and train precision shooters. He also worked on the psychological effects of alcohol. He later developed the first topics of interest about the relationship of the movements of the eye with perception and on the conditions of human variability.
In an article published in 1919, Dodge proposed the idea of a "College of Mental Engineering for coordinating the available fragments of our science of the social mind for the practical solution of pressing [postwar] social problems. " Such were the objectives of the Institute of Psychology founded at Yale in 1924.
Personality
In later years Dodge described himself as "defective in auditory and somewhat above the average in motor and kinaesthetic imagery, " qualities which, he believed, accounted for his difficulties with linguistic pursuits and his success in mechanical invention and manipulation.
A rigidly objective scientist, Dodge was also a warm, human personality. Although he would contend that the thrill derived from the success of a new technique or from a new scientific discovery was unscientific, his glee at seeing the tachistoscope "work" and at viewing his first eye-movement record belied his contention.
Students admired the clarity of his expositions and delighted in his humor and the irresistible chuckle which punctuated his sentences.
Connections
Returning to the United States, Dodge married Henrietta C. Cutler of West Acton, Massachusetts, on August 18, 1897. They had no children.
