Main description:

The forced migration of neuroscientists, both during and after the Second World War, is of growing interest to international scholars. Of particular interest is how the long-term migration of scientists and physicians has affected both the academic migrants and their receiving environments. As well as the clash between two different traditions and systems, this migration forced scientists and physicians to confront foreign institutional, political, and cultural frameworks when trying to establish their own ways of knowledge generation, systems of logic, and cultural mentalities.

The twentieth century has been called the century of war and forced-migration, since it witnessed two devastating world wars, prompting a massive exodus that included many neuroscientists and psychiatrists. Fascism in Italy and Spain beginning in the 1920s, Nazism in Germany and Austria between the 1930s and 1940s, and the impact of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe all forced more than two thousand researchers with prior education in neurology, psychiatry, and the basic brain research disciplines to leave their scientific and academic home institutions. This edited volume, comprising of thirteen chapters written by international specialists, reflects on the complex dimensions of intellectual migration in the neurosciences and illustrates them by using relevant case studies, biographies, and surveys. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

Contents:

Preface Introduction: Forced Migration in the History of 20th century Neuroscience and Psychiatry 1. "History has taken such a large piece out of my life" - Neuroscientist refugees from Hamburg during National Socialism 2. Between resentment and aid: German and Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist refugees in Great Britain since 1933 3. Emigrated neuroscientists from Berlin to North America 4. Learning soft skills the hard way: Historiographical considerations on the cultural adjustment process of German-speaking emigre neuroscientists in Canada, 1933 to 1963 5. A variation on forced migration: Wilhelm Peters (Prussia via Britain to Turkey) and Muzafer Sherif (Turkey to the United States) 6. Eugenics ideals, racial hygiene, and the emigration process of German-American neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897-1965) Commentary 7. Emigre scientists and the global turn in the history of science: A commentary on the volume 'Forced Migration in the History of 20th century Neuroscience and Psychiatry'