Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America

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This talk examines the long-term effects of forced migration between 1933 and 1989 on scientific and medical cultures in North America, when some 400 German-speaking migrants were placed into unfamiliar research settings in Canada and the United States. These migrants helped to build the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, clinical psychology, and the cognitive sciences, even
as they rebuilt their own lives within a new culture and faced the complications of relicensing. The talk will take account of how generational factors, gender, international networking, refugee organizations, and national funding agencies shaped migrant experiences and postwar remigration.

Frank W. Stahnisch is the Alberta Medical Foundation/Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary, cross-appointed in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the Cumming School of Medicine and the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts. His is editor-in-chief of the international Journal of the History of the Neurosciences and the author of A New Field in Mind (2020), Medicine, Life and Function (2012), and Ideas in Action (2003).