Over the last decade, the international dimensions of medicine and science have become topics of great interest among a wide community of historians, geographers, sociologists and anthropologists. From studies of the cultural and economic transmission of drugs, information, and materia medica through to more general inquiries into the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western medicine, scholars have increasingly sought and crafted narratives that explained and compared the ways that movements, circulations, exchanges, networks, and transfers between locales, regions, nations and systems encouraged the creation, proliferation and hegemony of some cultures (or civilisations) over others. Others, no less ambitious in their aims, became concerned to show through the same methods and analytical devices the ways that different languages, practices and power, even within relatively homogeneous cultures, could reinforce prevailing attitudes about progress or offer examples for alternative paths to shared problems. And it is in this latter category that we can locate International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II, an extremely well-edited, coherent and informative collection of essays by renowned authors.
No one with a general knowledge of the history of psychiatry will find big surprises awaiting them in this volume. Its editors have chosen topics that move through well-known narratives of institutions, state-funding, trends in non-state philanthropy, vogues in the provision of psychiatric health service, knowledge transmission in central and peripheral locales, and finally to questions of voluntary and involuntary assimilation. All but one of these studies adopt a transnational or international line of analysis. To those familiar with the history of psychiatry, most of the actors, institutions, practices and locations – excepting Pamela Michael’s fascinating study of interwar Welsh psychiatry – will be well known. There are, of course, some exceptions: while most essays utilise figures like Emil Kraepelin and Adolf Meyer to illustrate their stories, other lesser known figures do appear for an in-depth consideration, as for instance, Louise Westwood’s examination of the English psychiatrists Helen Boyle and Isabel Hutton. But in fact the strength of this collection derives specifically from this familiarity. Because there is no need to pore over the hoary details of institutions and organisations such as Yale University, the Maudsley Hospital, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the US or UK National Committee of Mental Hygiene (founded in 1909 and 1922 respectively), readers are allowed to think through the fresh contentions offered by an international focus, or, in the case of Mathew Thomson’s rather clever en passant study of mental hygiene in Britain, those trends towards isolationism that limited the role of outside influences.
International Relations in Psychiatry is self-evidently a useful, interesting, and important volume. The essays are short and snappy, would be useful for undergraduate teaching, and most of them would be of interest to non-historians curious about the history of mental health, psychology, psychiatry and neurology. Where the collection raises the most questions is in its limit to the peculiar geographical constellation of Britain, Germany and the United States. The word ‘Rapollo’, for example, doesn’t make a memorable cameo. Indeed the Soviet Union barely appears even as a foil in these studies. The apparent desire of some of the authors to mention but downplay Americanisation appears predicated more upon the volume’s choice of chronology than it does on any appreciable historical generality. These are, of course, pedantic criticisms. International Relations in Psychiatry is a very good book and there is much to be gained from reading it closely.
