Charles Samuel Myers

Charles Samuel Myers (1873 to 1946) was an English physician and psychologist who became a leading figure in British experimental and applied psychology. Born in Kensington, London, he studied natural sciences and medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and in 1898 joined the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, where he studied ethnic music. In 1912 he raised the funds for the first English laboratory designed for experimental psychology and became the first director of the Cambridge Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, and from 1911 he co-edited the British Journal of Psychology with W. H. R. Rivers. As consultant psychologist to the British armies in France in the First World War he was the first to use the term shell shock in an article in The Lancet in 1915, though he later acknowledged that he had not invented it, and he tried to save shell-shocked soldiers from execution. In 1921 he co-founded the National Institute of Industrial Psychology.