Edward Glover—Abstracted from a Biographical Sketch of Edward Glover

Edward Glover, born on the 13th of January, 1888, in Lesmahagow, Scotland, was the third of three sons of Matthew Glover, a country school master, and Elizabeth Shanks Glover. According to Edward Glover, like many school masters of the period, his father had mastered a wide curriculum and taught with equal ease Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, 'not omitting an English of the type that most Scottish dominies considered their rightful and unchallenged domain'—an influence apparent in his son's own writings. Matthew Glover's major purpose was to educate and train 'country boys "of parts" in the way in which they should go, namely on the high road to a university education'. Inevitably therefore his sons should follow academic careers. The church was quite out of the question, the father being a Darwinian agnostic. This left only the professions of law and medicine for the sons to follow.

After some conflict over what his future career should be, Edward Glover's close identification with his oldest brother, James, led him into medicine. In the course of his university years, the topics and men who fired his enthusiasm were Graham Kerr in evolutional zoology, Ralph Stockman in medical therapeutics, and Robert Muir in pathology. In retrospect Glover has commented that he came to appreciate that 'there was a central flaw in the fact that medicine and biology as taught in those days [1906] had certain incompatibilities'. Several years later he realized to what extent the resolution of this situation lay in medical psychology, at that time looked