To see how the transnational history of psychiatry worked out in concrete terms, perhaps no better example exists than the American neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866–1945). In his medical and publishing activities, Jelliffe exemplified patterns that marked the ways in which Americans reacted to German psychiatry in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Jelliffe is of special interest because he was both a key observer and an actor in the transfer of medical findings between the Old World and the New. As late as 1946, a colleague described Jelliffe and Adolf Meyer as the two links “between the psychiatrists of Europe and the United States.”

Jelliffe's activities, moreover, furnish striking evidence of the fundamental change in knowledge transfer that followed World War I—a change that historians have heretofore appreciated but little. One general development in international relationships marked the twentieth century: increasing American independence and insularity in the field of medicine. In the nineteenth century, American medicine was overwhelmingly derivative, transmitted largely from France and then from Germany—and the continental material was often conveyed through British publications. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, American physicians appeared to know or care little about medical developments elsewhere in the world. It is this transition from external dependence to self-sustaining independence and extraordinary provincialism that Jelliffe exemplified or inadvertently highlighted in his publishing endeavors.