Although the first holder of the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy, G F Stout, managed to pursue his research within the restrictions imposed by Henry Wilde, the second post-holder William McDougall attempted to work around them. He established a laboratory in the Department of Physiology, where he pursued his research interests in colour vision and fluctuations of perception.
Although Wilde attempted to persuade the University authorities to put a stop to McDougall’s experimentation, McDougall’s research was instead curtailed by the outbreak of World War I. He left Oxford to serve as a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1915 to 1919, where he specialised in treating soldiers with ‘shell shock’, what would now be called PTSD. On his return in 1919 he found that his laboratory space had been re-occupied, leaving him with nowhere to conduct his research. Becoming increasingly frustrated, McDougall left Oxford to take up the William James Chair of Psychology at Harvard University in the summer of 1920.
