International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II (review)

This volume's introduction states that any "up-to-date history of knowledge . . . needs to take forms of transnational communication and transfer into account" (p. 8). Histories of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and eugenics have, the editors claim, largely been told in terms of distinct national developments; this book aims instead to demonstrate how modern psychiatry developed in complex patterns of influence across national borders, and on regional, national, and transnational levels.

The concept of "transnational history" and its relation to global history and world history (among other terms) have provoked lively debate.¹ One way of understanding the enterprise is as a focus on the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation, one such factor in interwar psychiatry being supranational bodies such as the Rockefeller and the Commonwealth Foundations, pivotal in the discipline's development. Another way of understanding transnational history is in terms of an emphasis on movement, on diasporas, on complex transfers across local, national, and international territories, an emphasis that dovetails with a larger ambition: to transcend politically defined territories, thereby denaturalizing or problematizing the nation itself.

Many chapters here convey these multiple movements within and between Europe and the United States, especially those of curious, data-gathering individuals. We encounter, among others, Wilhelm Griesinger's visit to Britain in 1861 (in Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach's contribution); Smith Ely Jelliffe's European Wanderjahr (in John C Burnham's chapter); Kraepelin's visits to the United States in 1908 and 1925 (in Eric J. Engstrom's chapter); the seed of the Maudsley in Frederick Mott's 1907 visit to the clinics in Munich, Berlin, and Heidelberg (in Rhodri Hayward's chapter); the significance for American psychiatry and mental hygiene of Adolf Meyer's move to the States (throughout the volume); Eugen Kahn's move from Munich to Yale in 1929 (in Volker Roelcke's account); and Helen Boyle's visits, from the Lady Chichester Hospital in Brighton, to Scotland and Germany (in Louise Westwood's chapter). We also encounter the various fates of émigré psychiatrists in the interwar period as a whole, and of psychiatric refugees in the 1930s. Crucial in the Maudsley's emerging identity, these movements were problematic for many; as Paul Weindling discusses, the BMA during World War II especially was resistant to "alien medical practitioners," and while for some psychiatrists (e.g., Karl Stern and Erich Wittkower) Britain turned out to be simply a stop on the way to the United States or Canada, for others professional barriers and internment during wartime made for a difficult British stay.

The nation is indeed problematized by several chapters drawing attention to local regions penetrated differently by German or American developments. In her piece on Welsh interwar psychiatry, Pamela Michael notes that such developments, encountering the particularities of British legal and administrative structures, were not a single school of thought, monolithically replicated; British psychiatry remained and became ever more pluralistic. National influences are revealed in several contributions to be in themselves particular and local, subsequently embedding themselves in yet more particular contexts (then transported elsewhere). Thus in Rhodri Hayward's chapter, it is not German psychiatry per se that is the model inspiring British developments, but rather Kraepelin's Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich, and later clinics along the East Coast of the United States, that are shaping Maudsley psychiatry. Mathew Thomson's chapter draws out the particularities of the British mental hygiene (or rather mental health or welfare) movement, in the process querying narratives about the movement as international. Here, a story of national influence is to be broken down, not because of internationalism but rather because of British developments in social work and eugenics, debates about psychological causes of illness, moves toward the welfare state, and the reception of Adolf Meyer's work (which seemed...