Ben Shephard tells us that he read Siegfried Sassoon on holiday as a 14-year-old, and was intrigued by the portrait of the doctor who treated Sassoon: a certain WHR Rivers. He later became mildly obsessed with military psychiatry and psychology, publishing his A War of Nerves in 2000. It seems he'd gathered so much biographical information on the psychologists themselves that it seemed a shame to let it go to waste – so here is the book about those men. And they are, of course, all men. This is 19th- and early 20th-century science after all.

1. Headhunters: The Search for a Science of the Mind

2. by

   Ben Shephard

3. 
   

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The tale kicks off with Alfred Haddon setting off from London's Royal Albert Dock for the Australasian islands of the Torres Strait. He goes there as a zoologist, to look at coral, but becomes fascinated by the islanders themselves (especially the women, it seems, encouraging them to take off their recently adopted calico dresses and to go back to wearing grass skirts), and returns as an anthropologist. After attempting to measure the "Irish race", he sets his sights again on more exotic tribes and plans a second trip to Oceania. He collects a motley crew of medical students and psychologists to accompany him, including Charles Myers, William McDougall, Charles Seligman and William Rivers, and we are introduced to each with a potted CV.

Off they go, stopping en route at a brothel in Port Said and meeting the king of Krakatoa. The reader then takes a slight detour in order to be brought up to speed on Victorian racism and the origins of experimental psychology in Germany. Eventually the intrepid scientists reach the Torres Strait islands and set about bribing the islanders to take part in psychological tests. And then on to Borneo where they tag along with the self-styled (white) Rajah of Sarawak and collect some more data in a haphazard way.

The 19th and early 20th century was a difficult time for anthropologists. It was hard not to be racist, and this bunch of psychologists were no exception. Shephard criticises their colonial language and attitudes in some places, but he's also quite happy to write about "the natives" (when he's not quoting), and to describe Myers as "the urban Jew". And when Shephard writes that "an islander might have two names", it becomes clear he's just talking about the male islanders, in a way that's about as patriarchal as a 19th-century anthropologist might have been. In fact, women are conspicuously missing from the book. It's only occasionally that we hear about or from the long-suffering wives of the scientists.

By the end of part two, we've been all the way to the Torres Strait and learned very little indeed about comparative psychology. But here's Grafton Elliot Smith to save the day. He sounded like an interesting character, right from the start – we were told he carried "a tangible whiff of scandal" with him. Now we learn that he was the grandson of a baker, and that his father once worked in a Winsor Newton shop, before emigrating to Australia. Smith spends time measuring the skulls from Egyptian burials, then cooks up an extraordinary theory about ancient Egyptians carrying the secrets of mummification to the Torres islanders.

Part four is entitled "the most exciting decade", which is rather unfortunate, as we learn that this is a reference to what's happening in psychology in Germany, not where our story is taking place, in Oxford and Cambridge. With the outbreak of war, in part five, we follow each scientist independently becoming involved with treating shell shock patients (perhaps not such a surprising wartime occupation for a psychologist). There are arresting personal stories, but these are quickly passed over, and we're back to being overburdened with historical detail as Shephard details the composition of the official "shell shock committee", the positions of the four "shell shock centres" in Flanders, and provides a list of doctors who worked in them. Although broadly chronological, the narrative skips back and forth within and between chapters, and this section is no exception. Although we were promised a story of four men, whose "lives and careers are interlinked", we are served up chunks of quite separate biographies, and we keep spinning back to the start of the war to catch up with the next character.

The last section of the book follows each scientist from the end of the war up to his death. And finally, in his conclusion, Shephard would like to persuade us that these pioneers of psychology were less bumbling and blundering than he's perhaps made them out to be out to be. Maybe they weren't as racist as all that. Maybe Grafton Eliot Smith's misjudged theory of diffusion of ideas from ancient Egypt to the Torres Strait makes some kind of sense in the light of what we now know of ancient palaeolithic expansions around the rim of the Indian Ocean. (I'm less convinced.)

Now, this should be a brilliant read. There's adventure on the high seas, headhunters in Borneo, tombs in ancient Egypt, war and peace. But this book doesn't know what it is. As a Rider Haggardesque tale of faraway lands and exotic places and people, it starts off passably well, with a voyage to the Torres Straits, but it's destined to wind up in the National Institute of Industrial Psychology.

As a history of a discipline, it is meandering and strangely uncritical. As a tale of four lives (actually only briefly intertwined), it focuses almost exclusively on professional lives, with personal lives only glimpsed occasionally. All too often, when things look like they're about to get interesting on a personal level, the details are frustratingly thin on the ground. What was McDougall's "emotional upset", we're left wondering? Why did Myers and McDougall fall out in Borneo? Rivers' colleague, Harry Head, may have been "happily married since 1900", but what did Rivers think he was doing, carrying out neurological experiments on Harry's penis? In other places, historical and biographical details threaten to sink the story completely.

It didn't take me quite as long but, upon finishing the book, I'm afraid I felt rather like Haddon on his return from the 1898 expedition: "I can scarcely express how relieved I am after nine weeks meandering."