Rewritten from dealer description:

This item is a notebook containing psychology lecture notes from Harvard University, created in 1899. The notebook was owned by Marie Boisen, one of the university’s early female students. Beginning with basic concepts of individual difference, her notes then report a series of lectures on physiological responses to mental activity making use of a series of experimental apparatuses: the sphygmograph, ergograph, and pendulum chronoscope to measure response during differing mental states (rest, computation, pain, laughter, and more). The notebook contains several diagrams, as well as numerous data outputs from laboratory devices and one cyanotype photograph affixed to the pages. This photograph depicts Boisen seated in a classroom with colleagues around a table of laboratory devices.

Psychology as a discipline at Harvard began as a branch of philosophy in the 1870s, with courses in the ‘new’ physiological psychology, but by 1892, Hugo Munsterberg had been appointed professor of experimental psychology and director of the psychological laboratory. According to one of the registers in this notebook, eight out of twenty students were women in this class held in 1899.

The notebook contains one hundred and forty pages, and measures 27 x 19 cm. It is bound in backed boards with brass paper fasteners. The inside front cover is labeled with: ‘University note covers’ and stamped by the manufacturer: ‘Charles W. Sever and Company, University Bookstore, - Cambridge, Mass”.