Between the Clinic and the Laboratory: Ethology and Pharmacology in the Work of Michael Robin Alexander Chance, c.1946–1964

Abstract

Whilst ethology has garnered the attention of historians of science, particularly those interested in the biological and behavioural sciences, historians of medicine have yet to explore ethology’s medical significance. Ethology, “the biological study of behaviour”, is historically associated with the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who, alongside Karl von Frisch, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for their research into the “organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns”.1 This particular award is notable as it was the first to be given in part recognition of the establishment of a discipline rather than for a specific discovery or advance.2 This award was also provocative as it was the first to recognize non-reductionist behavioural research.3 Prior to 1973, otherwise renowned psychologists including Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung had failed to gain recognition, whereas some behavioural physiologists were awarded the Nobel Prize, for example Ivan Petrovich Pavlov in 1904. Historians of medicine should be interested in ethology as the 1973 prize recognized that ethological research had “led to important results for, e.g. psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, especially as regards possible means of adapting environment to the biological equipment of man with the aim of preventing maladaptation and disease”.4 This paper explores the relevance of ethology to the development of the clinical and biomedical sciences in post-Second World War Britain. In doing so it engages and extends Richard Burkhardt’s metaphorical use of ecology to describe ethology as characterized by interactivity, a responsiveness to contingency, and a willingness to evolve and adapt to a diverse number of “ecological” niches. The paper also continues Burkhardt’s biographical approach to ethology’s history by focusing on a single figure, the comparatively little known pharmacologist and ethologist Michael Robin Alexander Chance (1915–2000). It contends that medicine formed a hitherto unrecognized example of “ethology’s ecologies”.5 Michael Chance could be described as a marginal figure to the history of medicine; his work did not have the broad influence that would have made him of obvious historical interest. Moreover, Chance existed on the borders of so many sub-disciplines that it is difficult to identify who should be interested in his work. Employed as a pharmacologist, yet identifying himself as an ethologist, Chance’s research interweaved the fields of pharmacology, physiology, endocrinology, ethology, animal husbandry, psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology, amongst others. Spatially, and practically, Chance’s work found application in locations as diverse as the material practices of laboratory science and the education in clinical observation of medical students. Adequately historicizing the diversity of Chance’s oeuvre would be a major undertaking beyond the bounds of a single article. Consequently analysis is here restricted to how he integrated ethology within laboratory science in order to reveal the “social” nature of laboratory animals. In the 1940s Chance turned to ethology as a means to study how social behaviour altered laboratory animal responses and undermined their experimental reliability.6 His work was no less instrumental in orientation than, say, the genetic standardization of mice undertaken by C C Little.7 Chance saw the animal as a tool, but, none the less, emphasized the “nature” of the laboratory animal as a living being with social relations, relations that included that between animal and human. The paper begins by outlining how Chance first encountered the “social” laboratory animal during his pharmaceutical work at Glaxo Laboratories. In order to contextualize his work within the culture and politics of the period, the origins of his interest in ethology are then traced, but not to animal behaviour. Chance’s ethological interests are shown to have developed during his time at the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham; thus he first learnt of ethology in the study of human health. Relocating the origins of Chance’s ethology from the animal to the human geographically repositions his work away from the laboratory (an unusual place for ethology to be practised) to the clinic. The importance of ethology to Chance’s experimental science is then explored, with particular focus upon how ethology imbued the laboratory animal with subjective “natural” characteristics, feelings, and needs. Consequently, Chance reconfigured the relationship between experimenter and experimental animal as one based on mutual obligation and co-operation. This is shown to have opened up a new territory within which the explicit recognition of an ethical relationship between researcher and laboratory animal became a necessary part of experimental practice. Accordingly, this paper argues not only that ethology operated within the laboratory despite its widespread association with the field, but also that it served as a vector by which other factors conventionally seen as being outside the laboratory became integrated within its material practices. Such factors included clinical observation and the consideration of animal welfare, both of which have been seen as extrinsic to, as opposed to integral to, the practices of laboratory science.8