Biography:

Edmund Ramsden joined the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter in 2008 as a research fellow on a Wellcome Trust funded project exploring the history of stress. He has previously worked as a Wellcome Trust Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, exploring the history of eugenics, population genetics and demography, and as a Research Officer on the Leverhulme Trust and ESRC funded project How Well Do Facts travel? at LSE. His research is centered on the relations between the social and biological sciences, with a particular focus on the study and control of populations. He is currently exploring the influence of rodent experiments in overcrowding on the human sciences, social policy, environmental design and urban planning, and the development of the fields of environmental or architectural psychology in Britain and the United States, concerned with the effects of the physical environment on health and behaviour, and with designing environments that reduce the stress of urban living.

Abstract:

Finding humanity in the zoo: animal models and the design of human habitats

In 1959, Henri Ellenberger presented a paper to his fellow psychiatrists in which he compared the zoological garden to the mental hospital. He accepted that such a comparison could seem farfetched, and took care to warn against the twin dangers of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism of viewing a lion in a cage as a depressed captive warrior, or a human patient as a caged animal. Yet, as sites of scientific investigation, their historical development was closely correlated; a means, as Darwin had explored, of identifying behavioural traits common among animals and man. For Ellenberger, both were laboratories for the study of the pathological effects of being contained over long-periods of time in an artificial and unnatural environment, be it zoo, hospital, prison, school or barrack. The paper will explore the influence of zoo psychology, psychiatry, ethology and ecology on environmental design and urban planning in the postwar era. It will examine how an understanding of such processes as personal space, crowding, and territoriality, emerged from studies and experiments in zoos such as London, Zurich and Philadelphia, to be applied to the human experience of the prison and the city. The paper will argue that while analogies and homologies between human and animal have proven popular, the boundary between them has been carefully negotiated. While the use of animal models continues in the study and design of the total institution, the proposition that the city is a human zoo is more commonly denied.