Religion and the Laboratory Revolution: Towards a Physiological Laboratory at a Calvinist University in the Netherlands, 1880-1924

Originally orthodox Christians were ambivalent about the modern research laboratory, which many of them dismissed as a symbol of ‘materialism’ and disbelief. It was only in 1918 that the Calvinist Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam established its first laboratory, for physiology, and F.J.J. Buytendijk became the first professor of physiology. Although it was precisely in the chosen field of animal psychology that some distinctive, Christian emphasis could be placed, the most important consequence of this step was that the university was more than before adapting to what was already customary elsewhere. It turned out that the foundation of the laboratory instigated the Vrije Universiteit’s own ‘laboratory revolution’.