Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832 to 1920) was a German physiologist and philosopher who is often called the father of experimental psychology. Born at Neckarau in Baden, he took his medical degree at Heidelberg in 1856 and then worked as assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, teaching the physiology laboratory course. Later, at the University of Leipzig, he founded in 1879 the first formal laboratory devoted to psychological research, which helped establish psychology as a science distinct from philosophy and biology. He also started the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien, in 1883. Wundt was the first person to call himself a psychologist, and a 1991 survey of American historians of psychology ranked him first for all-time eminence. His place in a medical atlas rests on his training and early career as a physician and physiologist.