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The twentieth century witnessed two devastating world wars that led to the exodus of millions of people. Counted among them were hundreds of neuroscientists and biological psychiatrists from Nazi Germany and its surrounding countries who were forced to emigrate in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of them settled in North America, where they profoundly influenced the development of the biomedical sciences.
Focusing on the years between 1933 and 1989, Great Minds in Despair examines the long-term effects of this forced migration on scientific and medical cultures in North America and on the researchers themselves. Frank Stahnisch traces the lives and careers of approximately four hundred German-speaking doctors, scientists, and researchers over two generations. Placed in unfamiliar research settings in Canada and the United States, they helped to build the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, clinical psychology, and the cognitive sciences, even as they rebuilt their own lives amid myriad challenges including cultural adaption and the complications of relicensing. Stahnisch explores how generational factors, gender, international networking, refugee organizations, and national funding agencies shaped their experiences and affected postwar remigration.
Great Minds in Despair provides an important revision to the brain gain thesis in migration studies by turning attention to the working conditions and social acculturation of an influential academic refugee group in North America.
“Based on a database of nearly four hundred curricula vitae, Frank Stahnisch’s magnum opus towers over all other works in the field of neurohistorical research.” Axel Karenberg, University of Cologne
“Stahnisch complements and extends [previous historians’] work on German-speaking neuroscientists in the Nazi era by considering the fortunes of those who were forced to leave Europe for Canada and the United States. The biographies of these 367 men and women reveal difficulties in obtaining permission to work, the niche status of the discipline, and their long-lasting personal trauma. Nonetheless, these scholars transformed practices in the field, found fruitful interdisciplinary connections, and produced pioneering results. Great Minds in Despair should be on the shelf of every research library. Highly recommended.” Choice
“At its core, this monograph provides a profoundly human narrative about academic refugees’ individual resilience amid a period of continued social and political upheaval. Stahnisch skillfully balances the personal challenges of this group of medical experts, which are situated among the professional networks and the institutional histories of North American universities and research centers.” Neuroforum