national academy of sciences arnold lucius gesell 1880—1961 A Biographical Memoir by Walter r. miles Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoir Copyright 1964 national aCademy of sCienCes washington d.C. ARNOLD LUCIUS GESELL June 21,1880—May 29, ig6i BY WALTER R. MILES IN DOCTOR GESELL, PH.D. and M.D., psychology and pediatrics were blended in a strong and attractive personality who became a distinguished leader in the scientific investigation of the growth potentials and patterns of the human infant. He founded The Clinic of Child Development at Yale in 1911 and was its director until 1948, when he became professor emeritus. This clinic func- tioned primarily as a research center by operating as a service organization. It thus won the confidence of many parents and achieved fame in the greater New Haven area. Many parents gladly brought or sought to bring their young at scheduled periods for the Gesell tests and measurements that would result in the scientifically established norms for infant development. This lively research unit was associated with the Department of Pediatrics of the Yale School of Medicine and under the creative leadership of President James R. Angell later became a division of the Institute of Human Relations in 1929. Ten years later Dr. Gesell and his staff were annually producing a score of publications while con- ducting follow-up examinations on about 175 cases, with referrals from different agencies and persons of 600 to 700, mostly of pre- school age, and 1,000 or more guidance and observational contacts centering on nursery children. The effort to study objectively hu- man infant growth had thus taken on man-size proportions and was exerting nationwide influence. Arnold was born June 21, 1880, in Buffalo County, Wisconsin, $6 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS in the town of Alma, the county seat, located on the western edge of the state, which is the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. About twelve miles northwest from Alma the Chippawa River, a Wisconsin waterway, joins the Mississippi. Alma, with no sister settlement on the other side of the river, was a two-story town. There was one long Main Street right next to the river and a paral- lel Second Street notched out of the bluff sixty feet higher up. Village life was observed from the riverside and the hillside points of view. This location provided hills for coasting and climbing and the river for sailing and swimming. Moreover, there was a good- sized riverboat with a big steam whistle that signaled events of in- terest at die dockside for both adults and children. Rafts of logs from the Chippawa and elsewhere were floated downstream and groups of loggers in their spiked boots wandered here and there, especially from one saloon to another. The boats often carried Negro roustabouts from the Soutli and sometimes their show-off play provided great fun. There were drunkenness, accidents, oc- casional drownings, and many other exciting things to see. There were the occasional public funerals, at which children and adults marched around to view the remains of friends or strangers. Of course there were churches and schools. Alma was not a bad town; it was a vital, vivid, small stage where the drama of life was played right in the open for all to see and hear at close range. The north- erly latitude, the hills and rivers, made the seasons distinct and interesting as a stage backdrop. In his autobiography1 Gesell comments on his life as a child in this thriving upper Mississippi River town. "Strange and sobering things kept happening as though they were part of the normal course of existence. None of these experiences was over- powering; but cumulatively they left a deposit in impression, which sensitized a background for my clinical studies in later life." Born and reared in Alma, Arnold was the eldest of five children. 1 History of Psychology in Autobiography, cd. by E. G. Boring, et al. (Worcester, Mass., Clark University Press, 1952). IV, 123-42. ARNOLD LUCIUS GESELL 57 He had two brothers and two sisters. Considering what he was to become and to undertake in his professional life, fortune had favored him. He had the panorama of human development unfold- ing before him and was in most intimate relationship with it. His temperament was such that he performed or shared in this closely knit family, without distaste, many of the duties of caring for his younger siblings. These intimate associations apparently influenced his own future. Arnold's father had a strong interest in the education of his chil- dren, and his mother is said to have been an unusually successful teacher in a difficult elementary school. There was a local high school of good repute in Alma. The principal, who was held in great respect by the Gesell family, seems to have been a stimulating educator. Arnold was graduated in 1896. At the commencement exercises, in place of a program consisting only of speeches, some demonstrations were given. Arnold was one of the demonstrators. By electrolysis he filled a test tube with hydrogen, which he then ignited to produce a flash-bang climax. For his encore he had designed, with help from the village blacksmith, a large electro- magnet, made in the shape of a horseshoe, its heavy winding con- nected to the local dynamo. The keeper for this magnet was an old-fashioned flatiron. The device was firmly fastened at a suitable height, the current was turned on, and the flatiron was suspended upside down, held by the magnet. And then, it is reported, the demonstrator grasped the flatiron's rugged handle with both hands and gently lifted his feet off the stage. On occasion teachers' institutes were held in Alma and as Arnold was now sixteen and had the ambition to become a teacher he requested and was granted the privilege of attendance. Thus he became acquainted with Mr. C. H. Sylvester, the state institute con- ductor, and a friendly relationship developed between them. Syl- vester gave Arnold a pocket microscope and accompanied him on a nature study trip to the high bluffs back of Alma, opening up a new horizon for this Wisconsin lad. 58 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Arnold, born forty years after Wisconsin entered the union, seems to have adopted the state's motto, which was one word: Forward. When he learned that Sylvester was to be on the faculty of a new institution, Stevens Point Normal School, just then being developed among the pine stumps of Portage County about 120 miles east of Alma as the crow flies, he managed to get there and to enter the school. He liked his studies and the institution offered him good opportunities for development. He was captain of the second-string football team and editor in chief of the school paper, Normal Pointer, and won a series of local, state, and interstate oratorical contests. Sylvester, who had maintained his interest in Arnold, was his mentor, suggesting and supplying summer reading material. Among the courses Arnold took at Stevens was a stimu- lating one in psychology under Professor Edgar James Swift, a man who had been trained at Clark University and who in due course was to direct Arnold to Clark University and G. Stanley Hall. Arnold was graduated from Stevens Point in 1899. Since a career as a high school teacher was Arnold's goal, he accepted a position in the Stevens Point high school as teacher of U. S. history, ancient history, German, accounting, and commercial geography, and coach and referee of football. However, this con- glomerate teaching experience did not satisfy his intellectual drive. He resigned at the end of the year and took refuge, by means of a still longer journey from home, in Madison and the University of Wisconsin, which had been founded in 1848. History having been his strong subject, he turned especially to courses by Professor Fred- erick J. Turner, a leading student of the Western movement. Under Turner's stimulation he wrote a senior thesis entitled "A Com- parative Study of Higher Education in Ohio and Wisconsin." He also took one or more courses in psychology with Professor Joseph Jastrow, who had been one of the early students at Johns Hopkins, and who had started a laboratory of psychology at Wisconsin in 1888. After two years at the University of Wisconsin, from which he received the B.Ph. degree in 1903, Arnold Gesell became prin- ARNOLD LUCIUS GESELL 59 cipal of a large high school at Chippawa Falls, Wisconsin, and had a very successful year with what he described as "a body of lively students." For the next two years, with the help of a tuition schol- arship, he attended Clark University. The stimulation of Professor Swift at Stevens Point had by now changed his goal. Clark University had gone through critical experiences in the years soon after it opened in 1889. Its income was drastically lower than had been expected. A large proportion of its faculty left when offered much higher salaries by President Harper, who was trying to recruit a staff for Chicago University. There was almost no money for plant development at Clark. However, its students and graduates were of excellent quality, due largely to the distinguished leadership of President G. Stanley Hall. Five years earlier Hall had organized at The Johns Hopkins University a department of psy- chology including a laboratory. He emphasized in his lectures and in the studies he directed the investigation of the abilities and men- tal traits of children. In Hall's case it had taken a long time and a great many shorter or longer contacts with professors and institu- tions, both at home and abroad, before he could settle on a field of study that he thought was practical and appropriate for the new age of science in which his life had been cast. His searching may be summarized in his own words: As my second stay abroad drew to a close and I had no prospect of a posi- tion I became, again, very anxious about my future, thought much of study- ing medicine and entering upon the practice of that profession, and finally decided that neither psychology nor philosophy would ever make bread and that the most promising line of work would be to study the applications of psychology to education. With this in view, and also with the desire to see something of the great men in other institutions, I spent the last months of this period in travel and in visiting schools.2 A glance through Hall's bibliography from 1882 to 1902, which numbers slightly over one hundred references, shows more than 2 Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1923), p. 216. 6o BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS forty that relate to studies of childhood, its development, and the proper education of children. Thus he earned a reputation as hav- ing founded a new science, "child study." He demonstrated the breadth and importance of this field and succeeded in communi- cating this interest to his graduate students. Gesell's doctoral thesis was in this tradition, a research on jealousy, and he was awarded the PLD. degree at Clark in 1906. Gesell's loyalty to and regard for President Hall were very great. Many years after graduation he characterized Hall's genius in words that deserve to be quoted: Hall was the acknowledged genius of the group at Clark. Although the term genius is often over-used, we can safely apply it to his intellect. True genius may be regarded as a creative developmental thrust of the human action system into the unknown. Hall embodied such thrusts, almost inveterately, in his thinking and in his teaching. He had, in ad- dition, an empathic protensity to revive within himself the thought proc- esses and the feelings of other thinkers. This same projective trait en- abled him to penetrate into the mental life of children, of defectives, of primitive peoples, of animals, of extinct stages of evolution. What if he could not verify his prolific suggestive thrusts, what if he seemed un- systematic and self-contradictory, what if he exaggerated the doctrine of recapitulation—he nevertheless was a naturalist Darwin of the mind, whose outlook embraced the total phylum, and lifted psychology above the sterilities of excessive analysis and pedantry.3 Science, like a fever, is communicated by personal contact. For two years after completion of his doctorate at Clark Univer- sity Gesell seemed to be looking for the right opportunity to work in the direction of his stirring interests and at the same time make a living. However, he had not yet settled on a specific professional objective. For a year he was an elementary school teacher and settlement worker at East Side House in New York City and in- cidentally was able to study an adult who suffered from delusions of a grandiose character. This study resulted in a publication. The following year (1907-1908) he went back to his home state as in- structor in psychology at the State Normal School of Platteville in 3 History of Psychology in Autobiography, ed. Boring, IV, 126. ARNOLD LUCIUS GESELL 6l Grant County near the southwest corner of the state and only some sixty miles from the University at Madison. At Platteville Gesell had his first opportunity to consolidate his teaching around a single subject which at the same time was new and much talked about. He had come from one of the most lively centers where this new science flourished and therefore he had many interesting facts and research results to communicate. Gesell, who had been guided to Clark University by Clark grad- uates who were teaching in Wisconsin, would doubtless have re- mained, as they had done, in his native state, had it not been for an offer from the Los Angeles State Normal School. He was in- formed .of this opportunity by Dr. Lewis M. Terman, who had been one of his fellow graduate students at Clark. The library facilities in the State Normal School at Los Angeles were unus- ually good, the teaching load was not very heavy, and there were stimulating associates including Terman, who was professor of psy- chology and pedology. Among Gesell's fellow teachers were Everett Shepardson, Wayne P. Smith, and two well-trained women, Jessie Allen and Beatrice Chandler. He acquired an orange grove near the school, built himself a bungalow, and on February 18, 1909, married Beatrice Chandler. In the summer of 1909 he and his wife spent some time in the east at a famous school, the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children that had been or- ganized in 1896 by Dr. Lightner Witmer, who was still its direc- tor. Witmer, a Leipzig Ph.D. of 1892, was now a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. His psychological clinic at Philadelphia was the first of its kind. The Gesells also spent some weeks reviewing the work at the Vineland Training School at Vineland, New Jersey. Here Dr. Henry H. Goddard, a Clark Ph.D. of 1899, was director of psychological research and was adapting and using the tests of Binet in a pioneering program of research on feeble-minded children. Gesell marked this visit at Vineland as the beginning of his professional interest in backward and defective children. Later he was to collaborate with Dr. Goddard in direct- 02 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS ing a summer course in the New York University summer school for the specialized training of teachers of backward and defective pupils. During his second year of teaching at Los Angeles, Gesell became increasingly aware of his need for a better background from which to consider the problems having to do with backward children. It seemed to him this need could best be met if he knew something about medicine. Therefore he took the bold step of determining to broaden his education by attending medical school. He spent the year 1910-1911 at the University of Wisconsin, devoting his efforts principally to the study of human anatomy and histology. At this time Yale University was in the process of developing a department of education and had chosen Professor E. C. Moore, previously superintendent of the Los Angeles public schools, as its head. Moore invited Gesell to become an assistant professor of education in the newly formed faculty. It seemed a highly desirable move. Gesell accepted and was able to arrange to teach his courses in the graduate school at Yale and at the same time carry on his work as a medical student in the Medical Department. There he came into contact with Yandell Henderson, the noted physiologist, Russell Chittenden, the famous chemist, and George Blumer, in clinical medicine. Dr. Blumer, Dean of the Medical School, was very sym- pathetic with Dr. Gesell's plans to study retarded children and pro- vided him with a room in the New Haven Dispensary. It was thus that a psychoclinic for children was established in 1911, and this constituted the beginning of the Yale Clinic of Child Development. The first paid assistant was Margaret Cobb Rogers. Dr. Gesell con- tinued with his medical course and received his M.D. degree from Yale in 1915. In the human race, development and achievement crown the multiple activities of growth and living. Progress is not uniform for all. Some are weak, some strong. There are the gifted and the handicapped, all products of genetics and environmental factors in life's laboratory. Dr. Gesell had matured a point of view and a be-