Frank Stahnisch (University of Calgary / IASH): Great Minds in Despair: Exploring the History of the Forced Migration of German-speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933-1963.
[IASH Work-in-Progress talk]
Abstract:
Likely no other single migratory event in modern global history has shaped today’s landscape in the biomedical sciences and academic learning as much as the large-scale forced migration of approximately 3,000 Jewish and oppositional scientists and 6,000 physicians and health care researchers from the German-speaking countries. Among these were approximately 600 psychiatry- and neurology-trained individuals, who were ousted from their positions during the times of Nazism and Fascism in Europe. Yet we do not have an adequate historical overview perspective on what the scientific impact and social implications of this forced migration wave to North America meant, and particularly not in the area of the new interdisciplinary field of the modern neurosciences and biological psychiatry. This particularly includes the levels of science, postsecondary research, and teaching, which Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) has described as the level of “normal scientists.” The current research project, which has been funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, therefore presents itself as an archaeology of one of the most powerful interdisciplinary areas of the empirical and natural sciences. The project focuses particularly on the impact of German-speaking biomedical researchers between 1933 (the seizing of power by the Nazis) and 1963 (the development of the Society for Neuroscience and other central international societies in the modern neurosciences).