International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II addresses a crucial period in the history of psychiatry by examining the transfer of conceptual, institutional, and financial resources and the migration of psychiatrists between Britain, the United States, and Germany. 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 responseswere 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 thevarious 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.

The psychiatric profession in Germany changed radically from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I. In a book that demonstrates his extensive archival knowledge and an impressive command of the primary literature, Eric J. Engstrom investigates the history of university psychiatric clinics in Imperial Germany from 1867 to 1914, emphasizing the clinical practices and professional debates surrounding the development of these institutions and their impact on the course of German psychiatry.The rise of university psychiatric clinics reflects, Engstrom tells us, a shift not only in asylum culture, but also in the ways in which social, political, and economic issues deeply influenced the practice of psychiatry. Equally convincing is Engstrom's argument that psychiatrists were responding to and working to shape the rapidly changing perceptions of madness in Imperial Germany. In a series of case studies, the book focuses on a number of important clinical spaces such as the laboratory, the ward, the lecture hall, and the polyclinic. Engstrom argues that within these spaces clinics developed their own disciplinary economies and that their emergence was inseparably intertwined with jurisdictional contests between competing scientific, administrative, didactic, and sociopolitical agendas.