A New Field in Mind: A History of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Brain Sciences

摘要

Everyone knows about the Nazi onslaught on academic Germany and Austria, but little is known on how this urgency benefited institutions elsewhere. Frank W Stahnisch, a German-born professor of the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary (Calgary, AB, Canada), reaffirms the central influence of Jewish émigrés on American neurosciences in his comprehensive book A New Field in Mind: A History of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Brain Sciences. The book emphasises the interconnectedness of psychiatry, neurology, and neuropathology. Universities around the world were eager to welcome these academics—the ease with which their German alma mater institutions found replacements will make many readers recoil. Underestimated but overdelivering was the common descriptor of these exiled neuroscientists. Stahnisch's lengthy book presents his concepts across some familiar ground. He recognises that this work only skims the surface of the history of academic neurosciences. He remains surprised that “luminaries such as Edinger, Flechsig or the Vogts” have been neglected in scholarship. But the history of the formative years of the neurosciences, of course, has a much larger narrative. For example, in the UK, the establishment of the National Spinal Injuries Centre at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital (Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire) was greatly enhanced by Ludwig Guttmann, who led rehabilitation efforts after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939. In 1936, Mussolini issued the Manifesto per la Difesa della Razza, which was soon followed by the promulgation of laws barring academic and professional careers to non-Aryan Italian citizens, specifically affecting 1986 Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini.