Centenary

The academic year 2006/7 marked one hundred years of formal psychology teaching at the University of Edinburgh and was marked by a number of events including a Centenary Symposium at the start of the year and a Centenary Dinner for alumni at the end of the year.

Psychology was in fact taught as a component of philosophy courses at Edinburgh much earlier in the nineteenth century, but 1906 saw the establishment of the first independent lectureship in psychology. This was made possible by generous funding from the George Combe Trust. Combe was an Edinburgh lawyer turned phrenologist and it can be argued an early exponent of the psychology of individual differences. He wrote extensively on many causes, but in particular on matters of education and social reform.

The Combe Trust had been set up to ‘educate the poorer classes in the laws of mental and bodily health’ and until the first Combe Lecturer was appointed, the Trust funds had been applied to the payment of itinerant lecturers, mainly in physiology. Funding continued from the Trust for almost fifty years and the name, the George Combe Laboratory was retained until the transfer of psychology from Old College to the Pleasance in the 1950s. Today psychology has its premises in 7 George Square, the old Watson’s Ladies College, and is part of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.