We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This article uses four historical case studies to address epistemological issues related to the animal model of human diseases and its use in medical research on human diseases. The knowledge derived from animal models is widely assumed to be highly valid and predictive of reactions by human organisms. In this contribution, I use three significant historical cases of failure (ca. 1890, 1960, 2006), and a closer look at the emergence of the concept around 1860/70, to elucidate core assumptions related to the specific practices of animal-human knowledge transfer, and to analyze the explanations provided by historical actors after each of the failures. Based on these examples, I argue that the epistemological status of the animal model changed from that of a helpful methodological tool for addressing specific questions, but with precarious validity, to an obligatory method for the production of strong knowledge on human diseases. As a result, there now exists a culture of biomedical research in human disease that, for more than a century, has taken the value of this methodological tool as self-evident, and more or less beyond question.
The decades around 1900 were crucial in the evolution of modern medical and social sciences, and in the formation of various national health services systems. The modern fields of psychiatry and mental health care are located at the intersection of these spheres. There emerged concepts, practices, and institutions that marked responses to challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and the formation of the nation-state. These psychiatric responses were locally distinctive, and yet at the same time established influential models with an international impact. In spite of rising nationalism in Europe, the intellectual, institutional, and material resources that emerged in the various local and national contexts were rapidly observed to have had an impact beyond any national boundaries. In numerous ways, innovations were adopted and refashioned for the needs and purposes of new national and local systems. 'International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II' brings together hitherto separate approaches from the social, political, and cultural history of medicine and health care and argues that modern psychiatry developed in a constant, though not always continuous, transfer of ideas, perceptions, and experts across national borders. Contributors: John C. Burnham, Eric J. Engstrom, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Pamela Michael, Hans Pols, Volker Roelcke, Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, Mathew Thomson, Paul J. Weindling, Louise Westwood. Volker Roelcke is professor and director at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Giessen University, Germany. Paul J. Weindling is professor in the history of medicine, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Louise Westwood is honorary research reader, University of Sussex, UK.
Looking back at almost fifty years of psychotherapy in post-war Germany, Annemarie Dührssen (1916–98), one of the grand old ladies of the discipline, proudly presented a story of success in 1994. In the immediate post-war years, between 1946 and 1950, there were already a considerable number of individuals and groups all over the country active in establishing hospitals or outpatient clinics exclusively devoted to psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy; in 1950, the first university programme in the subject was set up in Heidelberg; in 1967, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy was included in the catalogue of services offered by the statutory health insurance system; and in 1970, psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy had become obligatory subjects in the curriculum of medical students, resulting in the establishment of chairs in these areas at almost every medical faculty in West Germany.
During the period between ca. 1900 and the mid-1930s, German academic psychiatry was to some degree perceived as a model for clinical practice, research, and institutional organization in the field. However, parallel to the interest of British, American, and other psychiatrists in German psychiatry, there emerged among German psychiatrists themselves a growing multifaceted discontent about academic medicine in general and about aspects of the dominant approach in psychiatry in particular. Already during the 1920s, this discontent led some psychiatrists such as Eilhard von Domarus and Eugen Kahn to look to other academic cultures, in particular to that of the United States, which appeared to be characterized by a more open academic life, better career opportunities, and chances to develop new approaches to mental health care.
The career of Eugen Kahn in Munich and at Yale is an exemplary case study of the mutual perceptions and evaluations of American and German psychiatrists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It provides insights into the consequences of such mutual images on the decisions and activities of individual psychiatrists as well as of institutions such as universities or the Rockefeller Foundation. Kahn's move from the prestigious Psychiatric Clinic in Munich to the first chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene at Yale in 1930 also provides some insight into the question of what might happen if such mutual perceptions conceived from a distance were put to the test: The Yale medical faculty, as well as Kahn himself, had opportunites to check on their previous expectations in everyday academic life.
The decades around 1900 were a crucial period in the making of the various national systems of health services, as well as the formation of the modern medical and social sciences. The field of psychiatry and mental health care can be understood as located at the intersection of these spheres. Here, concepts, practices, and institutions emerged that marked responses to the challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and the formation of the nation-state. Psychiatry had a considerable impact on the modes of perception and evaluation, and on the patterns of action toward contemporary social concerns and political issues. These psychiatric responses were locally distinctive, and yet at the same time they established, in part, influential models with an international impact.
This volume addresses two important topics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. The essays deal with the transformation of psychiatry into one of the most contested and influential modern sciences; and they link this focus to broader issues of international relations and transfers of concepts, practices, personnel, as well as funds in a context of rising internationalism and nationalism.
For instance, an orientation toward new career opportunities in the United States by European physicians in the context of innovative and flexible institutional structures and systems of funding may be documented for the 1920s; yet this orientation has found almost no attention in the historiography of psychiatry.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.
