Psychology in a medical school: A personal account of a department's 35‐year history

In 1911 John Broadus Watson and Shepard Ivory Franz proposed that the teaching of psychology was as essential to the education of medical students as were anatomy, pharmacology, surgery, and the other basic and clinical sciences. Today, our country's 126 medical schools each employ an average of some 35 full‐time faculty psychologists; 6 have established full‐fledged departments of psychology that are comparable (administratively) to departments that include faculty from the more traditional basic and clinical sciences. Thirty‐five years ago (in 1957) the University of Oregon Medical School was the first medical school to create a department of Medical Psychology. The present writer was hired that year to chair that newly established department and has served continuously in that capacity since then. This Presidential Address to the APA Division of the History of Psychology offers the writer's personal perspective on the history and development of that department during its first 35 years of existence.