ABSTRACT
Behavioral pharmacology is now over 3 decades old. In 1955 Peter Dews published his article "Differential sensitivity to pentobarbital of pecking performance in pigeons depending upon the schedule of reward." This epoch-making study, whose implications have yet to be fully fathomed, emerged from a contact between Peter Dews, a pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School and B. F. Skinner's laboratory across the river in Cambridge, then peopled by such talented researchers as William Morse, Charles Ferster, and Richard Herrnstein. Morse was soon to join Peter Dews' laboratory, to be joined later by Roger Kelleher, and the trio of Dews, Morse, and Kelleher and their academic offspring were to provide a headwater of principles and research methods that remain in the mainstream of behavioral pharmacological investigation. But these proximal historical details obscure the distal, but deeper influences. The two disciplines whose confluence yielded behavioral pharmacology, namely the experimental analysis of behavior and pharmacology, have a common methodological origin in the classical physiology of Claude Bernard (1957). This has been emphasized by Travis Thompson (1984) in his retrospective review of Bernard's An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine wherein he says:
The experimental analysis of behavior has typically had its academic home in the discipline of psychology. Paradoxically, the experimental analysis of behavior shares much more with the tradition of Claude Bernard than it does with those of Wundt or Freud. Indeed, if an 19th century progenitor of contemporary behavior-analytic theory were to be identified, it would be Bernard and not, as is often claimed, James or Pavlov. James' pragmatism and Pavlov's reflexology were peripheral to the metatheoretical and theoretical foundations of modern behavioranalytic theory and practice.
(p. 211)