History of science is hard to write. Were its subject thoroughly antiquated—like alchemy, or salons, or dueling—it would have found more frequent analysis as an aspect of German culture. Unfortunately, historians of science have to straddle past and present, a position that frustrates efforts at placing their work in context. To avoid this hurdle, Frank Stahnisch presents the story of neuroscience as a set of disciplines that continually moved between institutions, countries, and eras.
A New Field in Mind opens in Imperial Germany, where Stahnisch shows how neuroscientists in Strasburg and Leipzig breached the confines of anatomy and physiology to join forces with physicians, psychologists, and philosophers interested in the study of the brain. This is an original finding. Traditional histories portray German neuroscience as stagnating during the Kaiserreich, with Britain taking over the lead in the twentieth century. The scientists in Stahnisch's book, by contrast, continually adapted to challenging conditions, treating brain injuries of soldiers wounded during the First World War and shifting their focus from physiological development to organic decline during the Weimar Republic. Both these moves aided the progress of neurology in the same way that studies of hereditary mental illness helped to establish the specialty of psychiatry.
The brain sciences turned abusive under National Socialism. Stahnisch recounts, for example, how Georges Schaltenbrand tested the transmission of multiple sclerosis by injecting monkey serum into human subjects and how Ernst Rüdin built a psychiatric empire on the basis of Adolf Hitler's racism. Other trimmers used the Third Reich's “oblique system of nepotism, obscurity, and arbitrariness” to force Jews out of their jobs and intimidate socialists, communists, and pacifists into fleeing the regime. The consequences of all this careerism are easy to imagine: the deaths of patients and prisoners, the ruin of the discipline in Germany, and the shift of the field overseas.
In 1934, Kurt Goldstein described soldiers suffering from brain damage as anxious, literal-minded, and insensible to their disability. The same might be said of neuroscience following the Second World War. Progress stagnated in Germany while psychiatrists like Richard Pfeifer denied their complicity in sterilization and murder. The situation was better in the United States, but American clinicians failed to appreciate the humanism that had fostered Goldstein's holistic neurology. “What was he really, they asked: a physician, a psychologist, or a philosopher?” Tragically, Goldstein never quite fit in at Columbia University, where he was unable to replicate the interdisciplinary investigations he had pursued in Berlin. The few émigrés who managed to flourish in the New World, like the physiologist Eric Kandel, developed programs of experimentation better suited to “the open, ongoing, and brutally frank exchange of ideas and criticism” common to American laboratories.
The final chapters of A New Field in Mind detail foreign contributions to genetic psychiatry, trauma research, and neurophysiology. Over time, refugees established connections with American colleagues, and together they rebuilt the network of academic exchange that had buoyed their innovation in Europe. By the 1960s, new centers of neuroscience arose in Boulder, Colorado and Brookline, Massachusetts modeled on Max Planck Institutes in Dahlem, Göttingen, and Heidelberg. Stahnisch nevertheless conveys how immigrants from German-speaking countries often faced humiliating poverty, uncertain employment, rank discrimination, and dispiriting loneliness. A case in point is Robert Weil, a Czech psychiatrist who did much to promote mental health in Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia despite local habits of suspicion and prejudice. As an intellectual migrant himself, Stahnisch is especially sensitive to the difficulties involved in changing one's mode of thought, site of work, and body of colleagues.
A New Field in Mind is the product of enormous research. It advances our understanding of the development of a novel branch of science, and it contributes to the recovery of the traces left by German émigrés on academic landscapes in Canada and the United States. Stahnisch deserves particular credit for avoiding the lifeless determinism that frequently mars institutional histories; instead, he demonstrates that neuroscience was created by people who labored on the margins. It is an important and inspiring story.
