Dr. Frank W. Stahnisch presents at the Center for History of Medicine, Harvard University, USA

Dr. Stahnisch was recently invited to present at the Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine – Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine in a virtual event at Harvard University’s Medical School. His lecture on October 20, 2022, imparted findings from his recent book with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2020): In A New Field in Mind. Frank Stahnisch documents and analyzes the antecedents of the modern neurosciences as an interdisciplinary field. Although postwar American research centres, such as Francis O. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program at MIT, brought the modern field to prominence, Stahnisch reveals the pioneering collaborations in the early brain sciences at centres in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in the first half of the twentieth century. One of these, Heinrich Obersteiner's institute in Vienna, began its work in the 1880s. Through case studies and collective biographies, Stahnisch investigates the evolving relationships between disciplines - anatomy, neurology, psychiatry, physiology, serology, and neurosurgery - which created new epistemological and social contexts for brain research. He also shows how changing political conditions in Central Europe affected the development of the neurosciences, ultimately leading to the expulsion of many physicians and researchers under the Nazi regime and their migration to North America.