Dr. Frank W. Stahnisch gives paper at Harvard Medical School

Dr. Frank Stahnisch was invited to give a paper to the History of Medicine and Psychiatry Colloquium at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. On December 19th, 2024, he presented findings from his forthcoming book with McGill-Queen’s University Press to an interdisciplinary audience of historians and sociologists of medicine, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists. “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. Dr. 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.”