Search

Objective: This article explores the life and career of Sebastian K. Littmann. He was a foundational figure of the University of Calgary's Department of Psychiatry in his role as its second chair and, before this, as an influential administrator at Toronto's Queen Street Mental Health Centre and Clarke Institute during a transitional period in the 1970s-1980s. According to McGill University's Heinz Lehmann, this transitional period was when the field of psychiatry underwent an identity crisis that threatened to dissolve the discipline and see its functions increasingly filled by counsellors, neurologists, and primary physicians. Littmann's professional background and training in Edinburgh was followed by periods of community work in New York, which-by the time he immigrated to Canada-predisposed him to favour a humane and community-based approach to psychiatric work; this approach encompassed the cultural variations that were increasingly characterizing North America's urban social landscape. His compassionate and progressive approach to treatment was remarkable in light of his troubled and deprived upbringing in Nazi-era Germany., Conclusions: The present sketch of Littmann's personal and professional biography serves to highlight the ways that major historical events and large-scale migration movements, which affected Central Europe, impacted the development of Canadian psychiatry and, by extension, individual Canadians in the twentieth century.

This special issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, comprised of six articles and one commentary, reflects on the multifold dimensions of intellectual migration in the neurosciences and illustrates them by relevant case studies, biographies, and surveys from twentieth-century history of science and medicine perspectives. The special issue as a whole strives to emphasize the impact of forced migration in the neurosciences and psychiatry from an interdisciplinary perspective by, first, describing the general research topic, second, by showing how new models can be applied to the historiography and social studies of twentieth-century neuroscience, and, third, by providing a deeper understanding of the impact of European émigré researchers on emerging allied fields, such as neurogenetics, biological psychiatry, psychosomatics, and public mental health, etc. as resulting from this process at large.

The forced migration process of German-speaking neurologists and psychiatrists under the Nazis during the 1930s and 40s is often preoccupied solely with "successful" concepts and therapeutic approaches. The case of German-Canadian neurologist Karl Stern (1906-1975) is very instructive, however, since the process of forced migration, for him, proved to be a transitionary process from his former cutting edge work in neuropathology and holist neurology in Germany to clinical psychiatry and the development of the new discipline of geriatric medicine in Canada.

French-Austrian psychiatrist Bénédict Augustin Morel's (1809-1873) Traits des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine (1857) was fully dedicated to the social problem of "degeneration" and it became very attractive to German-speaking psychiatrists during the latter half of the 19th century. Auguste Forel (1848-1931) and Constantin von Monakow (1853-1930) in Zurich integrated Morel's approach and searched for the somatic and morphological alterations in the human brain; a perspective of research that Ernst Ruedin (1874-1952) at Munich further prolonged into a thorough analysis of hereditary influences on mental health. This paper investigates the continuities and major differences within some early eugenic traditions of the emerging field of psychiatry in the German-speaking countries and North America.

Originating in the late 19th century, psychiatry and neurology emerged during a period of several decades as two distinct fields of medical inquiry, separate from the study and practice of internal medicine. Around 1900, the German-speaking countries in Europe played an important role in this development. In this article, the publication of three influential multivolume and multiauthor handbooks are studied. All available volumes of Max Lewandowsky's Handbuch der Neurologie (1910-1914) and the Handbuch der Neurologie (1935-1937) of Oswald Bumke and Otfrid Foerster are analyzed. The handbooks are compared with Pierre Vinken and George Bruyn's Handbook of Clinical Neurology (1968-2002). This article is particularly timely in that it helps to reveal some of the origins of the disciplinary split-even at a moment when "brain psychiatry" (Wilhelm Griesinger), "neuropsychiatry" (Kurt Goldstein), and the German notion of Nervenheilkunde all acknowledged the interdisciplinary nature of both psychiatry and neurology. Particular emphasis is placed on the preeminent role that Jewish clinical neurologists assumed in the editing of the respective handbooks, leading to the extraordinary breadth and wealth of these publications. A great number of doyens in the fields of neurology and psychiatry-among them numerous Nobel Prize laureates-were involved in the dissemination of contemporary knowledge, including diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, which testifies to the fundamental status that these handbooks held for training purposes for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Finally, the volumes analyzed in this article (between 1911 and 2002) are representative of a shift in the dominant scientific language, from German to English, since the 1930s and the 1940s, as well as the change in geographical distribution of the leading scientific authors, from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Italy, and Scandinavia) to North America (the United States).