New perspectives on forced migration in the history of twentieth-century neuroscience

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Clinical neurology
• cultural adaptation
• Europe
• Fascism
• forced migration
• Nazism
• social contexts
• transatlantic transfers
• twentieth-century neuroscience
• world

The forced migration of hundreds of neuroscientists and thousands of researchers and professors from the Fascist and Nazi-occupied European countries in the first half of the twentieth century still poses a major conundrum for the history of medicine and science today (Ash & Soellner, 1996). Often, the so-called “Brain Gain Thesis” is invoked as an unquestioned given in studies on the forced migration of physicians and medical researchers following the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany after 1933. Research literature on the receiving countries has primarily tended to take the intellectual, academic, and institutional dimensions of the forced migration wave into account (Medawar & Pyke, 2001), while the individual fate and adaptation problems of many émigré neurologists and psychiatrists are still fairly underinvestigated. This special issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences looks at the fate of a group of émigré physicians and researchers who could be classified as “neuroscientists” widely and who immigrated to the United States, Canada, Britain, and Turkey (Schwartz, 1995) either transitionally or permanently. The thesis put forward here is that the process of forced migration most often constituted an end or at least a drastic change to the career patterns of this group of medical professionals (see also Stahnisch, 2010). Based on historical evidence, the “Brain Gain Thesis” needs to be significantly readjusted as a methodological tool in the field of immigration studies in medicine.

Persecution, emigration, and readaptation of German-speaking Jewish and oppositional neuroscientists and psychiatrists

The forced migration of Jewish and political oppositional physicians and scientists in Germany, as well as later also in Austria and many of the occupied European countries, was primarily brought about by the inauguration of the Nazi Law on the Re-Establishment of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums) from April 7, 1933 (Bleker, 1989). During the same year, when the first refugees reached their new host countries, various scientific and social assistance groups had already been founded, of which the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (formerly known as the British Assistance Council, which Sir William Henry Beveridge [1879–1963] had initiated in 1933) deserves particular mentioning (Zimmerman, 2006). Yet, unfortunately, in 1933 when the Nazi Party came to power, professional associations such as the “American Medical Association” (AMA), the most influential pressure group for the protection of medical interests in the United States, became themselves engaged in campaigns to constrain the relicensing process for foreign-educated physicians (Pearle, 1981).

This themed issue investigates some important negotiation processes and cultural influences on modern neuroscience with a focus on institutional, organizational, and researcher migration issues. The articles assembled here follow integrated prosopographical, institutional, and network historiographical approaches, while investigating the biographical, conceptual, and organizational information on émigré neuroscientists (cf. Zeidman & Kondziella, 2012), who were ousted from their home countries in the 1930s and 1940s. They came to various new scientific landscapes, primarily in North America, the United Kingdom, Israel (Palestine), and Turkey, which adds a distinctly global perspective to the forced migration movement during the first half of the twentieth century (Strauss & Roeder, 1983). The articles compiled in this special issue further analyze the role of international networks that facilitated the forced migration of the special group of approximately 600 neurologists, psychiatrists, and other medical researchers and clinicians, as well as the subgroup of these refugees that was integrated into North American neuroscience centers, the reciprocal changes of these research settings, and the ways they were locally modified (Niederland, 1988). By applying a cultural view to neuroscience history, the current contributions give new insights into the nature of progressive and regressive factors of individual forms of research organization, the development of institutional models, and their impact on modern neuroscience as a whole. They thereby contribute to the advancement of knowledge in medicine and provide historical information for use among respective stakeholders, such as researchers, administrators, and organizational leaders, about the development and state of the international neurosciences (Magoun, 2002). The underlying topics investigate some major institutional settings and patterns of migration and adaptation in North American neuroscience between the 1930s (when Fascism and Nazism had been at their high point of power in Europe) and the 1950s (when most of the émigré neuroscientists and psychiatrists had actively resettled and reintegrated in the scientific and medical research landscapes of their new home countries), in order to determine its receptiveness to external impulses and its permeability for foreign researchers and physicians.

The exodus of medical doctors and brain researchers as a result of the “de-judification” of German-speaking neuroscience

Nazi ideology, as exemplified in the “Law on the Re-Establishment of the Professional Civil Service” (Longerich, 2010, p. 38) regarded it as unacceptable, and even dangerous, if Arians were taught by Jews, and as a result many university professors, teachers, and doctors of the public health service lost their positions in the German civil service system. Even honorary officials of scientific boards and academic committees were released from their duties (Holdorff & Winau, 2001). Hence, this law cut deeply into the developed culture of science and medicine during the Weimar Republic, now in a cultural and political climate, where the Nazi legal programs and actions became paralleled through the rising dominance of racial hygiene, eugenics, and later even patient euthanasia in psychiatry and neurology (Weindling, 1989). What is further crucial with respect to the emergence—and in this instance largely the destruction—of the new research field of the neurosciences was the active persecution and expulsion of what the Nazis saw as a “Jewish form of medicine and health care” in Germany. This was particularly exemplified by the previous psychoanalytic tradition in psychiatry, socialist public health programs, as well as the emergence of medical sexology (Sexualwissenschaft) (Herrn, 2010). The normative context of medicine and psychiatry in the “Third Reich” was such that medical scientists stepped out of their normal doctor–patient relationships and also left deeply engrained professional behavior of mutual respect, while pursuing lines of open antagonism towards their Jewish colleagues and the doctors who openly resented the increasing radicalism and inhuman shape of the medical system.

These changes in the political and organizational structure of the German-speaking medical system became particularly visible in the process of expulsion and later murder of Jewish and non-conformist doctors (Kater, 1989). However, research literature has been primarily concerned with the biographical developments along with the criminal activities of contemporary doctors, while the particular cultural and social context of the Nazi period has been only marginally discussed. It is these developments following 1933, however, that are quite important for the narrative of this special issue including, for example, the loss of medical licenses to practice for individual doctors and clinical researchers, restraints for Jewish neurologists and psychiatrists to exercise their professional and academic rights, as well as the restrictions of medical care applications to Jewish patients only. At the same time, mental asylums, social care facilities, and health education institutions were shut down—representing important preludes to what extended into the greatest exodus of scientists and doctors in European history (Medawar & Pyke, 2001, pp. 231–240).

While the primary focus is laid here on émigré neuroscientists, it needs to be emphasized that not all clinical neurologists, psychiatrists, and laboratory researchers who left Germany and Austria after 1933 were of Jewish descent. Although the numerical data are vacillating on this point, between 10 and 20% of the science émigrés decided to leave Europe for other reasons—out of fear that their relatives could be imprisoned, due to their former political opposition (as socialists, communists, or pacifists), or merely because they had been abroad on research fellowships and decided that things could only get worse for them if they returned to Germany or Austria (Niederland, 1988, pp. 285–300). This is, for example, the case for Berlin biophysicist Max Delbrueck (1906–1981) (who also did important neuro-membrane research), who later became a professor at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, or Hungarian-born, Viennese-trained Stephen W. Kuffler (1913–1980). Kuffler worked on single nerve-muscle preparation and joined Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, after an extensive period in John Eccles’ (1903–1997) laboratory at the University of Otago in New Zealand, where he investigated the neurophysiology of nerve dendrites. Also in this category is the clinical psychiatrist and geriatric physician Erich Lindemann (1900–1974), who arrived in the United States in 1927 and through other appointments later became the chairman of psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States.

Taking a brief look at the general numbers of the émigré neuroscientists reveals that approximately 2,000 scientists and university professors were expelled from Germany before 1938 (Ash & Soellner, 1996, pp. 23–47). Amongst them were nearly 600 researchers, according to a 1988 survey from the Leo Baeck Institute for the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry, with half of these researchers being fully trained neurologists and psychiatrists (Krohn et al., 1989, pp. 904–1048). This sample represents a highly significant group with respect to Germany as well as in comparison to the new host countries. The registers of the Royal College of Physicians, for example, show the presence of around 200 psychiatrists and several dozen neurologists in the United Kingdom in 1940 and the files of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) list approximately 500 individuals with specialty training in 1948 (AAN, 1948–1953) after the end of the Second World War. The historical problem of emigration-induced change has been researched from multiple perspectives including the fields of the humanities and social sciences. Not only did they draw on individual biographies and collective biographies but they also measured the “hard impact parameters” like bibliometric methods, memberships in academic associations, and statistics on the leading positions in scholarly societies (Juette, 1990, pp. 17–122).

This sample, therefore, represents a fairly significant group of refugee academics. That this massive loss of researchers had had a disastrous effect on basic and clinical neuroscience in Germany and Austria is self-explanatory, while some authors have interpreted these occurrences simply as a matter of “brain loss” for German-speaking science and in terms of the brain gain thesis for the rest of the world (Medawar & Pyke, 2001, pp. 231–240). Although this view might not be entirely wrong, it fails to provide us with the full complexity of the processes involved, and, too often, individual gains came at a significant loss—for clinical medicine, biomedical research, and psychiatric practice, as well as many personal hardships and disappointments. Not much ink has however been spilled on the actual problems and obstacles that émigré scientists encountered, when arriving and adapting to their new host countries. In examining the processes of scientific and cultural adaptation of some of these émigré researchers and physicians, when they arrived in their receiving cultures in North America, the articles in this special issue shift the local, primarily German-speaking context in neurology and psychiatry to the greater international level and the long-term effects since the 1930s and 1940s, along with their contributions to the emergence of interdisciplinarity in the new research field of neuroscience (including neurogenetics, biological psychiatry, and neuroimaging). Although such patterns identify sometimes preselective effects, not only of influential individuals—like the Frankfurt clinical neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965) or the Breslau psychiatric geneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)—or of local scientific milieus of the émigré neuroscientists, for example, at Harvard or Columbia University, these all had a decisive impact on the future development of the neurosciences during the 20th century.

Historiographical and methodological perspectives on the forced migration wave in twentieth-century neuroscience and psychiatry

In fact, the exodus of so many psychoanalysts, such as the Vienna-trained founder of modern psychosomatic medicine Franz Gabriel Alexander (1891–1964), who came to the University of Chicago, Frankfurt neurologist Leo Alexander (1905–1985), Sandor Radó (1890–1972) from Budapest, who went to Columbia University where he became the head of psychiatry, Helene Deutsch (1884–1982) from Vienna, who went to Boston and co-founded the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, or the German émigré psychiatrist Charles Fischer (1902–1987) (later at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute), probably shaped North American neuropsychiatry, mental health, and experimental psychology in many more ways than any other process related to forced migration (Grob, 1983, pp. 124–165). With regard to the emerging interdisciplinary field of neuroscience in the German-speaking countries, our interest is rather on particular areas of biological psychiatry, such as the “emigration” of neurological synapse research, insulin-shock therapy, and neurogenetics. Their relationship with basic neuroscience brings the forced migration process closer in touch with the historiographical narrative of many of the articles assembled here. Some contradictory and fairly independent developments also become visible, since, for example, psychoanalysis became one of the major adversaries of shock therapies in the wider context of North American psychiatry and public mental health. The double volte face from the praise of psychoanalysis over brain psychiatry, its antagonism with genetic and biological psychiatry, and its later repulsion due to the advances in molecular medicine and clinical neuroscience was a ground-breaking process in the development of modern neuroscience in North America itself (Magoun, 2002, pp. 405–410).

According to American historian Jack Pressman’s book Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (1998), the reassessment and reevaluation of contemporary mental health practices towards the development of aggressive surgical and interventional psychiatric therapies was nevertheless already underway during the first half of the 1930s (Pressman, 1998, pp. 158–160). The new somatic forms of therapy had been particularly associated with Egaz Moniz’ (1874–1955) psychosurgery in Lisbon, Portugal, and Ugo Cerletti (1877–1963) at La Sapienza University of Rome, where he developed electroconvulsion therapy (ECT) that became further adapted as Insulin- and Cardiazol-shock therapy later on. Among the émigrés, who were helped by the first group of transatlantic travelers, were major representatives of non-analytical brain psychiatry, such as psychiatric geneticist Franz Kallmann from Berlin and pioneers of somatic treatment approaches, for example, Ukraine-born and Vienna-trained neurophysiologist Manfred Sakel (1900–1957) as well as Budapest’s Ladislaus von Meduna (1896–1964), who later joined their colleagues in major North American research centers in New York City and Chicago. Their examples clearly emphasize the important role played by the scientific intermediaries and often matching institutions. This early integrative process became further amplified through institutional involvements of the Rockefeller Foundation since 1934/1935, and its close ties to the German research institutions since the Weimar Republic, as well as the American Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, which counted various German-born scientists among their members (Ash & Soellner, 1996, pp. 86–114).

Published disciplinary histories and available oral history accounts by scientific refugees have already pointed to major scientific achievements and methodological landmark events. The contributions of these refugees can be further analyzed through looking at the alignment of émigré neuroscientists with respective research groups involved in such developments as laboratory progress in neural regeneration research, new classifying approaches of brain tumor pathology, or the introduction of electron microscopy in histological nerve cell research, to name only a few. When prudently aligning this historiographical analysis with the development of early interdisciplinary approaches in German-speaking neuroscience, a number of very similar observations emerge as Israel-based historian Ute Deichmann has pointed out in her preceding work on emigration-induced changes in experimental biology: “The emigration of scientists after 1933 caused, with a higher probability, significant scientific change within novel fields of research rather than within the established ones” (Deichmann, 1996, p. 9).

The contributions to this issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences

Bernd Holdorff’s (Berlin) article, entitled “Emigrated Neuroscientists from Berlin to North America” begins this volume by describing the situation in Germany in 1933 when the Nazis rose to power. With the “Law on the Re-Establishment of the Professional Civil Service” being inaugurated in April of the same year, dozens of neurologists, brain psychiatrists, and neuropathologists were driven out of their university or city hospital positions in Berlin. This article describes the fate of several individuals in more detail, such as Frederic Henry Lewey, Kurt Goldstein, or Fred Quadfasel, while also concentrating on the specific collective biographical aspect of this emigration process. The second article by Stephen Pow (Budapest) and Frank W. Stahnisch (Calgary) is entitled “Eugenics Ideals, Racial Hygiene, and the Emigration Process of German-American Neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965).” It looks at the career development of one of the most influential neurological and psychiatric geneticists of the 20th century, first in Germany and later in his North American exile. While Kallmann was largely successful in re-establishing his research program at the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University’s Medical School, this case example allows interesting insights into the relationship of competing research traditions by émigré clinical neuroscientists and psychiatrists, particularly the impact of the adherents of psychoanalysis on the early fate of biological psychiatry in the United States. The next article is coauthored by Lawrence A. Zeidman (Chicago), Anna von Villiez, Jan-Patrick Stellmann, and Hendrik van den Bussche (all from Hamburg) as “‘History Had Taken Such a Large Piece Out of my Life’ — Neuroscientist Refugees from Hamburg during National Socialism.” Similar to the foregoing contributions, the article argues that 400 doctors in Hamburg alone were dismissed for their Jewish family background or political inclinations, while following the specific émigré biographies of 16 of them who had been faculty members before. The next contribution by Frank W. Stahnisch (Calgary), titled “Learning Soft Skills the Hard Way: Historiographical Considerations on the Cultural Adjustment Process of German-Speaking Émigré Neuroscientists in Canada, 1933 to 1963,” considers the typologies of the émigré neuropathologists Karl Stern (1906–1975), Robert Weil (1909–2002), and Heinz Lehmann (1911–1999). It thus complements the descriptions in the first three articles, which focus particularly on the United States as the receiving country, by emphasizing the local living and working situations of émigré researchers and academics in Canada. In her exceptionally innovative and extraordinary article, Gül Russell (College Station) focuses on a hitherto rather neglected group of émigré neurologists, neuropathologists, and brain psychiatrists, who under the aegis of German-Jewish neuropathologist Philipp Schwartz (1894–1977) found refuge and a second home in Turkey. Turkey, already influenced by the Humboldtian ideal of the German research university, benefited greatly from the group of German refugee professors and doctors in the development of its research institutions as well as the Turkish health care system at large. Her article is titled “A Variation on Forced Migration: Wilhelm Peters (Prussia via Britain to Turkey) and Muzafer Sherif (Turkey to the United States).” Turning to further special cases in the history of forced migration in the neurosciences, Aleksandra Loewenau (Calgary) thematizes in the final article “Between Resentment and Aid: German and Austrian Psychiatrist and Neurologist Refugees in Great Britain since 1933,” the great many difficulties that these individuals faced when first trying to find continuing employment on the British Isles during the Second World War. Many of the psychiatrist and neurologist refugees, who are discussed in her article, then tried to migrate onwards to North America and other continents after the war. Loewenau’s article thereby provides intriguing insights into Great Britain as a destination of permanent yet also transient exile for German-speaking émigré neuroscientists since 1933. Our special issue ends with a historiographical commentary from Delia Gavrus (Winnipeg), entitled “Émigré Scientists and the Global Turn in the History of Science: A Commentary on the Special Issue ‘New Perspectives on Forced Migration in the History of Twentieth-Century Neuroscience,’” which situates the articles assembled in this issue in the wider discourse about emigration, international relationships, and biomedical progress in the recent history of medicine and science literature.