Verified by 
Memory is a treacherous and delusive faculty: you often remember what did not happen and forget what did. A quotation that you could have sworn that you recalled perfectly turns out to be different from what you ‘remembered’ (you did not even get the author right), and sometimes you are presented with irrefutable evidence that you have remembered wrongly the dates, the times, the sequence, the events that you would have happily attested to on oath without the least intention of perjuring yourself.
On the other hand, memory is not always false; the problem is that we feel as certain of our false as of our true memories.
Having recently written about the ethics of animal experimentation in a book that I hope will one day be forthcoming, I found myself thinking about a lecture I heard forty-one or forty-two years ago when I was a medical student. I can be pretty sure of the lapse of time because it immediately inspired me to buy a book just printed, that is in 1973.
The lecture was about something then called Maternal Deprivation Syndrome. Very small children who had been neglected or abused by their mothers had been observed to grow much slower than expected, in some cases suffering from what was also then called dwarfism. A scientific controversy raged as to whether the children’s failure to grow was caused by emotional or psychological factors, or simply because neglectful or abusive mothers failed to feed their children sufficiently.
The lecturer reported an experiment in which children suffering from the syndrome were divided into three groups after they had been separated from their mothers and placed in an institution: the first was given attention and adequate food, the second adequate food but no attention, and the third attention but inadequate food. Those who were given adequate food grew quickly, but those who were not given such food failed to do so; attention added no extra growth. Therefore, the dwarfism of maternal deprivation syndrome was caused by poor nutrition.
I think we, the students, were all a little shocked by this experiment (which, presumably, did not continue long), but we said nothing. Instead, I went out and bought Maternal Deprivation Reassessed, by the eminent child psychiatrist Michael Rutter. I read it at a sitting but had not read it since, not until I started rummaging in my memory.
I seemed to recall that somewhere it described an experiment somewhat along the lines of that I heard about in the lecture: but was my memory accurate? I was intrigued to find out and took it down from my shelves.
The opening sentence on a section titled A Loving Relationship made me laugh:
‘Love’ is difficult to define and many writers have rejected this
aspect of mothering as introducing mystical and immeasurable
elements.
One has to remember that in 1973 behaviourism was still strongly entrenched in the world of psychology, with its methodologically puritanical eschewal of all that could not be observed and measured: from which it seemed (psychologically-speaking) but a short jump to supposing that what could not be measured did not exist. To be fair to Rutter, he did not believe this himself: but still someone might perform a useful function for humanity in gathering an anthology of all the foolish things said or written by psychologists in the last century and a quarter.
In the section of the book titled Emotional Privation or nutritional privation? Can be found the following:
In deprived human infants growth retardation has not been found
when the infants were adequately fed, as shown in a well-controlled
study… Thirteen maternally deprived infants with height and
weight below the third percentile were investigated. The inadequate
mothering at home was simulated in hospital by solitary
confinement for two weeks in a windowless room, but the infants
were offered a generous diet. In spite of the continuing emotional
and sensory deprivation, eleven of the thirteen infants showed
accelerated weight gain. The two others failed to eat properly,
though offered food.
To this, the author appended a rather mild footnote:
This rather drastic treatment raises questions of how far it is
justifiable to provide a restricted environment to human infants
even for a brief period.
The results of the above experiment were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Preceding the account in the book are accounts of horrible experiments conducted on rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees, some of them by H F Harlow. Was the knowledge obtained by these horrible experiments worth the suffering they entailed? I could not help but recall (though I have checked up on this to ensure that my memory has not betrayed me) what Dr Johnson said more than two centuries before these experiments were performed:
If the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he
surely buys knowledge dear, who learns the use of the lacteals at
the expense of his humanity.
