In 1921, William Brown succeeded McDougall to the Wilde Readership. Brown, who treated patients at King’s College Hospital in London, was interested in both mental measurement and psychotherapy. He had had considerable experience in clinical nervous and mental diseases during the War as a medical officer in charge of Craiglockhart War Hospital for neurasthenic officers and as a neurologies to the Fourth Army in the British Expeditionary Force in France. (Nature 158, 938-938. 28 Dec 1946)
Brown also struggled with the constraints of the Wilde Readership, writing in the British Medical Journal that:
Oxford has been singular among great universities in possessing no laboratory of experimental psychology… After having worked for twelve years in the well-appointed psychological laboratory at King’s College, London, it was a disappointment to the new reader to have no facilities of accommodation or apparatus for experimental work on his subject. William Brown, ”Psychology At Oxford”, The British Medical Journal 1:3934 (May 30, 1936), p. 1121.
However, things were about to change. Following widespread interest from students in lectures in experimental psychology, sometimes in such numbers that “no lecture room at Christ Church could accommodate them, and an adjournment... had to be made to the hall” (Brown, p.1122), a proposal was put forward to create a new Institute of Experimental Psychology. The Institute, which would include a laboratory, lecture room and equipment, was to be founded on the site of the former St Giles School at 34 Banbury Rd. The University approved the proposal, and financial support was secured from the Rockefeller Benefaction for Research in the Social Sciences and a private donor named Anna Watts, a friend and former patient of Brown’s.
