contributed by Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr., Emeritus Member of the Cummings Center Advisory Board
Collectible cards have been around for well over 100 years. Today they exist in a variety of forms and subjects. When most people think of trading cards, baseball cards and Pokémon cards are likely the ones that most often come to mind. But trading cards have been printed for almost every subject imaginable: cartoon characters, country music stars, Star Wars, famous scientists and inventors, authors, Disney characters, classic music composers, film and TV stars, Rock and Roll icons, rappers, and every imaginable sport. Most of these cards have little monetary value but there are many exceptions. For example, on August 29, 2022, an anonymous buyer purchased a 1952 Topps baseball card for $12.6 million, the largest sum ever paid for a single piece of sports memorabilia. It was a mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card. When it was purchased in 1952 it would have been in a wax-wrapped package with several other cards and a piece of bubble gum and would have sold for either a penny or a nickel. So are there trading cards for psychologists? The answer is yes and no.
The Cummings Center for the History of Psychology (CCHP) is the repository for a vast amount of material related to the science and practice of psychology. It includes manuscript collections (personal papers) of hundreds of important psychologists; thousands of psychological tests; thousands of unique and rare photographs and films, including home movies of Sigmund Freud; more than 1,500 pieces of apparatus, some of them unique such as Stanley Milgram’s “shock box;” thousands of popular psychology magazines, some dating to the 1840s; a vast postcard collection that offers a pictorial view of the social history of the United States and other countries in the 20th century; and a fascinating collection of ephemera, that is, items that were not intended to be preserved forever but are as part of the CCHP collections. And that is where you will find the psychologist trading cards.
It is a small collection, a little more than 90 cards, representing 21 individuals. The earliest card is from 1900 and the latest one from 2024. In truth, few of the persons in this collection were actually psychologists, but they are included in the collection because their work was important to the science and/or practice of psychology. Names that almost everyone would recognize include Charles Darwin, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Helmholtz, William James, Ivan Pavlov, B. F. Skinner, and Roger Sperry. To my knowledge, none of these cards was ever packaged with bubble gum.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) influenced psychology in so many ways, for example, paving the way for the field of comparative psychology, illustrating the value of studying individual differences, and leading psychologists to understand the evolutionary advantages of consciousness. The cards for Darwin are an interesting mix. The earliest cards were packaged with British cigarettes, as were American baseball cards. Baseball cards appeared in American cigarette packs in 1888 and continued until World War II paper shortages ended the practice in 1940. Pictured below are two Darwin cards that were in British cigarette packs. The one on the left is from Ogden’s Guinea Gold Cigarettes and was issued in 1900. The one on the right is from Nicolas Sarony Cigarettes and dated 1923. Darwin would have disapproved vehemently of the description of his theory on the Ogden’s card. He did not, as the card states, “prove the descent of man from monkeys.” Such misunderstandings of Darwin are commonplace still in the 21st century.
Sometimes the cardbacks were blank, but in most cases the backs were printed with information about the pictured individual. Here is an example from Shelley Cigarettes from 1924.
You will notice that the Shelley Darwin card is No. 10 in a series of 25 labeled “Men of Genius.” In fact most of these cards, like baseball cards, are part of a numbered set. Note that the number 290 appears on the front of the Ogden’s Cigarette card. It was part of a set of 300 cards. Five years later a second set of 300 cards was issued and Darwin is included in that set as well (No. 283).
In the CCHP card collection, there are Darwin cards from nine different cigarette companies, eight of them English and one German. The last of these cards was issued in 1951. In 1934, Darwin appeared on a card placed in packages of tea sold by the Ty-phoo Tea Company. The company issued 25 cards (of which Darwin is No. 6) in a series entitled “Homes of Famous Men.” The drawing on the card shows the back of Darwin’s home in the village of Downe, now considered a part of the Greater London area.
Darwin cards were also issued as part of sets from another three English tea companies up to the 1970s. And his card was also included in a set for a Belgian chocolatier in 1938. The latest card in the collection to be packaged with some consumable product was issued by the Quaker Oats Company in 1974 in their cereal Sugar Puffs.
As an aside, the Quaker Oats Cereal Company was founded in Akron in 1872 and in the 20th century became the largest single employer in the city.
The French philosopher René Descartes’ (1596-1650) greatest contribution to psychology was his mind-body dualism that established mental activity as separate from physical activity and thus emphasized the study of mental processes. Pictured below are two of his cards. The first is from Stollwerck, a German chocolatier and dated 1908. The second, dated 1940, is from a French baker, Pelletier, and was included in packages of biscotti.
Evidently there are no old cards of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) whose contributions are principally to psychotherapy, although to the science of psychology as well, for example, emphasizing the importance of early experiences for personality and behavioral development, and describing defense mechanisms, such as repression, that can impact memory. There are 11 Freud cards in the collection, the earliest one dated 1969. Below is a 2009 card minted by the Topps Company that is the premiere minter of sports cards.
Whereas Freud’s contributions to psychology were largely on the clinical side, Ivan Pavlov’s (1949-1936) work on the conditioning of behavior was significant for the science of psychology, particularly the study of learning. He was the first Russian to win a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on the physiology of digestion. His later work on conditioning was nominated for the Prize in four separate years but did not win. There are six Pavlov cards in the collection. The earliest appeared in cigarette packs manufactured by Max Cigarettes, a South African company. The text on the back of those cards is in both English and Afrikaans. Below is Card No. 60 in a set of 250. There is another Pavlov card in this set (No. 61) that shows Pavlov performing surgery in his lab. The card set appeared in 1935. Pavlov died the following year at age 86.
As indicated earlier in the description of the Darwin card contained in boxes of Sugar Puffs cereal, these kinds of combinations, that is, with cigarettes, tea, chocolate, etc., likely ended in the 1970s. Yet the production of these cards of scientists and others continues today in several different forms. There are sets that are intended for collectors, sold in small packages that are bought in pursuit of a complete set, for example the Darwin card in a set of Garbage Pail Kids cards or the William James or Freud cards in the Gilded Age Series. There are playing cards featuring individuals on different cards, e.g. Darwin, Freud, and John Stuart Mill. There are cards that are part of games, e.g., a Freud card in the game of Cranium. There are sets of flash cards meant for learning, principally history, for example, American history, such as the Grolier “Story of America” cards. These cards were sold between 1994 and 2001 and contain a number of images related to psychology including cards on John Dewey, B. F. Skinner, and Roger Sperry. All of the cards listed in this paragraph are in the CCHP collection, and a complete set of the Grolier cards can be found in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Note that the backs of the Grolier cards give considerable information about the contributions of the pictured individual.
It is disappointing that actual psychologists, such as Skinner above, have been mostly absent from these cards. That was true in the days of cigarette, tea, and chocolate cards when such individuals as Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus, William James, Alfred Binet, and John Watson might have been included. Yet it is also true of the cards published in the past 25 years that might have honored, for example, Frederic Bartlett, Jean Piaget, Carl Rogers, Kurt Lewin, Noam Chomsky, and Herbert Simon. Other important social scientists, for example in sociology and anthropology, are also scarce in these card sets, a bias that is mirrored in other treatments of the sciences, where the emphasis is on the physical and biological sciences. The publication of collector cards continues to enjoy popularity. Perhaps psychologists will fare better in the future. In the meantime these cardboard mementos recognize the significant contributions of some of the philosophical and physiological precursors to the science and practice.
Note: all images contributed by the author.
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