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Transnational History of Medicine after 1950: Framing and Interrogation from Psychiatric Journals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

John C. Burnham
John C. Burnham
Affiliation:
* Professor John C. Burnham, Ohio State University, Department of History, 106 Dulles Hall, 230 West 17th Avenue, Columbus OH, 43210, USA. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Communication amongst medical specialists helps display the tensions between localism and transnationalisation. Some quantitative sampling of psychiatric journals provides one framework for understanding the history of psychiatry and, to some extent, the history of medicine in general in the twentieth century. After World War II, extreme national isolation of psychiatric communities gave way to substantial transnationalisation, especially in the 1980s, when a remarkable switch to English-language communication became obvious. Various psychiatric communities used the new universal language, not so much as victims of Americanisation, as to gain general professional recognition and to participate in and adapt to modernisation.

Keywords

Citation AnalysisCommunicationDisseminationEnglish LanguageGlobalisationInformationInternationalityMedical PublicationsPsychiatryTransnationalisation
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 3 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Hereafter ‘German’ and ‘Germany’, with apologies particularly to Austrians and Swiss. The fact remains that they all did read and cite German-language material and, within that linguistic community, people did move back and forth, for example in university professorships. The Austrian case is further examined below.

2 Nicolas Henckes, ‘Narratives of Change and Reform Processes: Global and Local Transactions in French Psychiatric Hospital Reform After the Second World War’, Social Science & Medicine, 68 (2009), 511–18.

3 No journal from France was included because the French community was exceptional and, where it was not, the details did not appear to offer additional insight.

4 See the summary in Henckes, ibid. Transnationalisation in my context refers to crossing boundaries between psychiatric communities that commonly were conceptualised as either political or virtual ‘nations’.

5 Charlotte A. Cottrill, Everett M. Rogers, and Tamsy Mills, ‘Co-citation Analysis of the Scientific Literature of Innovation Research Traditions’, Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 11 (1989), 181–208.

6 Alfred E. Eckes, ‘Globalization’, in Gordon Martel (ed.), A Companion to International History, 1900-–2001 (London: Blackwell, 2007), 408–21, authoritatively displays the centrality of economic and political considerations in globalisation. Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and its Contents (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), points out that globalisation was still in a formative stage. Alain Touraine, ‘A Critique of the Concept of Globalization,’ in Catherine Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin (eds), The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 250, comments specifically on the role of journals in globalisation. Stephen Casper, ‘Neurology and the Global Practices of Medicine and Science’ (unpublished paper, 2008), very generously furnished by the author, has forcefully made the case for the power of economic frameworks in the case of inter-war neurology, which often included psychiatry; and when psychiatrists struggled to be noticed internationally through their specialty journals, they showed competitive ambition that almost certainly had indirect pecuniary as well as cultural considerations, however remote. Casper also takes up the question and literature concerning the conflict between local influences and globalisation.

7 The general problem of communicating innovation in medicine, including transnationally, is explored, with references, in Jennifer Stanton (ed.), Innovations in Health and Medicine: Diffusion and Resistance in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002). Transnational history is explored in C.A. Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), 1441–64.

8 Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Harry Oosterhuis, Joost Vijselaar and Hugh Freeman (eds), Psychiatric Cultures Compared: Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in the Twentieth Century: Comparisons and Approaches (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005); Ido de Haan and James Kennedy, ‘Progress, Patients, Professionals and the Psyche: Comments on Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in the Twentieth Century’, in ibid., 435; see also Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Mueller (eds), Transnational Psychiatries: Social and Cultural Histories of Psychiatry in Comparative Perspective c.1800–2000 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).

9 Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (New York: Routledge, 2006), with great clarity contends with these factors on a general level, although he persists in using the term ‘globalisation’ rather than ‘transnationalisation’.

10 The historical attempt to modernise is quite distinct from modernism, a cultural complex that waxed and then waned in this same time period.

11 See, particularly, Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). The cross-border trading metaphor of course suggests substantial equality between the traders in ideas. The complicating factor of colonial relationship can also be factored in, for example, as shown by Richard C. Keller, ‘Taking Science to the Colonies: Psychiatric Innovation in France and North Africa’, in Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds), Psychiatry and Empire (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), who notes local complications once one accepts that from France ‘most of the discipline’s novel concepts between 1900 and 1950… crossed the Mediterranean to the French colonies in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco as easily as they crossed France’s European borders’, 18. A survey of the contexts of science as late as the 1990s was still showing remarkable local differences in the environment for science: Bernard Schiele (ed.), When Science Becomes Culture: World Survey of Scientific Culture (Proceedings I) (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994), including continuing evidence of notable cultural nationalism, 352.

12 Some background is in Michael Shepherd, ‘Psychiatric Journals and the Evolution of Psychological Medicine’, in W.F. Bynum, Stephen Lock and Roy Porter (eds), Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge: Historical Essays (London: Routledge, 1992), 188–206.

13 Casper, op. cit. (note 6), presents a striking examination of the impact of personal travel in the partially overlapping field of neurology between the world wars. See also Johan Heilbron, Nicolas Guilhot, and Laurent Jeanpierre, ‘Toward a Transnational History of the Social Sciences,’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 44 (2008), 146–60. The more general subject of scientific travel is explored in Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro and Maria Paula Diogo (eds), Travels of Learning: A Geography of Science in Europe (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003).

14 Thomas Neville Bonner, American Doctors and German Universities: A Chapter in International Intellectual Relations, 1870–1914 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). The problem of international students became extremely complicated in the last half of the twentieth century. In the United States, the ‘foreign medical graduates’ who went for study often stayed and became part of American psychiatry rather than going back and bringing a transnational point of view to the specialty in their native countries; see, for example, George Tarjan, ‘Presidential Address: American Psychiatry, A Dynamic Mosaic’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 141 (1984), 923–7.

15 Henckes, op. cit. (note 2), 511–18. The importance of the WHO also comes out in Andrew Lakoff, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

16 Stephen T. Casper, ‘Atlantic Conjunctures in Anglo-American Neurology: Lewis H. Weed and Johns Hopkins Neurology, 1917–1942,’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82 (2008), 671; Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser, ‘Prologue and Introduction’, in idem (eds), Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2006), 7, however, warn about too quickly and superficially assuming that infrastructural connections lead to cultural influence.

17 The centrality of the twentieth-century scientific journal is argued by J.M. Ziman, Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), ch. 6; see also Alan G. Gross, Joseph E. Harmon and Michael Reidy, Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially ch. 8. The striking observation that journals typically preceded specialty identities and organisations, first made by M. Jeanne Peterson, ‘Specialist Journals and Professional Rivalries in Victorian Medicine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 12 (1979), 25–32, supports the contention that journals could be sensitive indicators of historical developments. The agency of journals in shaping professional thinking is exemplified in Nicholas Mann, ‘Translatio studii: Warburgian Kulturwissenschaft in London, 1933–1945,’ in Roberto Scazzieri and Raffaella Simili (eds), The Migration of Ideas (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2008), 151–60, see also n.232.

18 Peter J. van Strien, ‘The American “Colonisation” of Northwest European Social Psychology after World War II’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 33 (1997), 349–63; see Mark F. Proudman, ‘Words for Scholars: The Semantics of “Imperialism”’, Journal of the Historical Society, 8 (2008), 395–433, and the specific case of science, John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

19 Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht (ed.), Decentering America (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).

20 Adrian C. Brock (ed.), Internationalizing the History of Psychology (New York: New York University Press, 2006), offers systematic questions and striking evidence in exploring this question for psychology; Sanjoy Bhattacharya, ‘Medicine’, in Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 710, notes that ‘national territorial borders were less rigid than is often assumed, as traders, medical practitioners, health agencies, patients and the civilian targets of organised public health campaigns were able to determine the demand and supply of medical products’—including ideas.

21 John C. Burnham, ‘The Transit of Medical Ideas: Changes in Citation of European Publications in USA Biomedical Journals’, Actas del XXXIII Congreso International de Historia de la Medicina, Granada-Sevilla: 1–6 Septiembre, 1992 (Sevilla: Imprenta A. Pinelo, 1994), 101–12; John C. Burnham, ‘Patterns in Transmitting German Psychiatry to the United States: Smith Ely Jelliffe and the Impact of World War I’, in Volker Roelcke, Paul J. Weindling, and Louise Westwood (eds), International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2010), 91–110. The most obvious cause for the decrease in percentage of citations to other national communities was a remarkable upsurge of narrow, provincial cultural nationalism.

22 The literature on citation studies is extensive; see Claire Donovan, ‘Citation Analysis’, in A.H. Halsey, A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 241–7.

23 A similar point is made with regard to a very different kind of medical problem in which, in this time period, technical matters, as opposed to clinical judgements, travelled internationally; see John C. Burnham, ‘Biomedical Communication and the Reaction to the Queensland Childhood Lead Poisoning Cases Elsewhere in the World’, Medical History, 43 (1999), 155–72.

24 See Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones and Brian Uzzi, ‘The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge’, Science, 316 (2007), 1036–9, and the literature they cite from observers who commented over the years concerning the growth of team research. See also below in this paper.

25 Eugene Garfield, ‘The English Language: the lingua franca of International Science’, in Eugene Garfield, Essays of an Information Scientist, 15 vols (Philadelphia: ISI Press, 1971–1992), Vol. 14 (1991), 344–5; Eugene Garfield, ‘English Spoken Here’, in idem, Vol. 15 (1992), 258–9; Eugene Garfield and Alfred Welljams-Dorof, ‘Language Use in International Research: A Citation Analysis’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 511 (1990), 10–24.

26 Based on Journal Citation Reports, 1991.

27 As will be explained below, this was the case transparently in the re-named Acta psychiatrica belgica after 1970.

28 The French case in science in general was discussed frequently in the ISI publications; see, for example, Eugene Garfield, ‘French Research: Citation Analysis Indicates Trends are More than Just a Slip of the Tongue’, in Garfield, op. cit. (note 25), Vol. 11 (1988), 171–9, and Garfield and Welljams-Dorof, op. cit. (note 25), especially 290, in which it was reported that the French cited themselves at a rate that was very high—even higher than the notorious USA rate.

29 I stopped sampling after 1981 because the findings were not throwing further light on my questions.

30 European Archives of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences, 234 (1984), A9.

31 See Eugene Garfield, ‘Citation Analysis of Neuroscience Journals: What They Cite and What Cites Them’, in Garfield, op. cit. (note 25), Vol. 5 (1982), 713–20.

32 This was communicated to me by Professor Volker Roelcke, whom I thank for his generous assistance.

33 This observation is based on purely impressionistic evidence.

34 In 1939, the predecessor psychiatry–neurology journal carried papers in German and also English and French, but the authors were Scandinavian. By the beginning of the 1950s, English had become completely dominant in the journal, and an occasional paper appeared from a non-Scandinavian European author.

35 Announcement carried inside the front cover of each issue of the journal.

36 Based on information very kindly furnished by Dr Ernst Falzeder, and on Ulrich Meise and Hartmann Hinterhuber, ‘Sind deutschsprachige Fachzeitschriften obsolet? Gedanken zum 20-jährigen Jubiläum der “Neuropsychiatrie”’, Neuropsychiatrie, 20 (2006), 83–5, very kindly furnished by Professor Hartmann Hinterhuber.

37 Ibid.; Kai Simons, ‘The Misused Impact Factor’, Science, 322 (2008), 165, summarises the case against the impact factor, about which there is a huge literature, such as Somnath Saha, ‘Impact Factor: A Valid Measure of Journal Quality?’, Journal of the Medical Library Association, 91 (2003), 42–6.

38 This national neurological–psychiatric French-language journal was already in 1951 carrying 16% of the articles with all-English references, but two-thirds of the articles had no references from outside of the Francophone community. By 1967, still with over half of the articles neurological, 78% of the articles had substantially international references (27% all English).

39 ‘Editorial’, Acta psychiatrica belgica, 70 (1970), 5–6.

40 Ekkehard Hundt, ‘German Post-WWII Developments and Changes in the Language of Science’, in Einar H. Fredriksson (ed.), A Century of Science Publishing: A Collection of Essays (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2001), 98–9.

41 Hundt, ibid., 100–1.

42 Jean-François Picard and William H. Schneider, ‘From the Art of Medicine to Biomedical Science in France: Modernization or Americanization?’, in William H. Schneider (ed.), Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: International Initiatives from World War I to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 106–24.

43 Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn and Sverker Sörlin, ‘The Nationalization and Denationalization of the Sciences: An Introductory Essay’, in Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin (eds), Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993), 4–5. In 2009, ‘half of the papers published… in Science had authors from more than one nation,’ according to Bruce Alberts, ‘Promoting Scientific Standards’, Science, 266 (2010), 12.

44 Lakoff, op. cit. (note 15). Not least of the pressures were the marketing strategies of international drug companies.

45 Eugene Garfield, ‘Surgery Journals: Another Operation in Citation Analysis’, in Garfield, op. cit. (note 25), Vol. 8 (1985), 197–212.

46 Mitchell G. Ash, ‘Forced Migration and Scientific Change after 1933: Steps Toward a New Approach’, in Scazzieri and Simili (eds), op. cit. (note 17), 161–78, particularly underlines a contention that ideas did not travel independently of the people who carried them, and that ideas, once transported, could have substantially different meanings in different temporal and cultural contexts.

47 Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin (eds), The Transnational Unconscious: Essays in the History of Psychoanalysis and Transnationalism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Robert S. Wallerstein, ‘Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: An Historical Perspective’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 70 (1989), 563–91.

48 Jerome Kroll, ‘Philosophical Foundations of French and U.S. Nosology’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 136 (1979), 1135–8; see also, for example, Volker Roelcke, Krankheit und Kulturkritic: psychiatrische Gesellschaftsdeutungen im bürgerlicher Zeitalter (1790–1914) (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999); Volker Roelcke, ‘Psychotherapy Between Medicine, Psychoanalysis, and Politics: Concepts, Practices, and Institutions in Germany, c.1945–1992’, Medical History, 48 (2004), 473–92.

49 See especially Christopher Lawrence, Rockefeller Money, the Laboratory, and Medicine in Edinburgh 1919–1930 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005); Lakoff, op. cit. (note 15), 64; Cornelius Borck, ‘Between Local Cultures and National Styles: Units of Analysis in the History of Electroencephalography’, Comptes rendus biologies, 329 (2006), 450–9. One possible sign of Americanisation was the general use of the US diagnostic manual, the sometimes notorious DSM, as noted by Marijke Gijswift-Hofstra, ‘Within and Outside the Walls of the Asylum: Caring for the Dutch Mentally Ill, 1884–2000’, in Gijswift-Hofstra et al. (eds), op. cit. (note 8), 59. Many European clinicians preferred a competing diagnostic scheme, published by the WHO, but, ironically, in English.

50 D.G. Wilkinson, ‘Psychiatric Aspects of Diabetes Mellitus’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 138 (1981), 1.

51 Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Lakoff, op. cit. (note 15), 52, 151.

52 See, for example, Ole Didrik Laerum, ‘Doctors in Research—A World of Conflicting Objectives’, in Øivind Larsen (ed.), The Shaping of a Profession: Physicians in Norway, Past and Present (Canton: Science History Publications/USA, 1997), 427–8.

53 Françoise Harrois-Monin, ‘Europe as Third World: US Perceptions of Continental Science’, Journal of Information Science, 13 (1987), 307–11.

54 Hundt, op. cit. (note 40), 107.

55 See the nuances in L.S. Jacyna, Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head (London: Pickerington and Chatto, 2008).

56 Crawford, Shinn and Sörlin, op. cit. (note 43), 1–42, especially 2, note that science was international, but scientists were nevertheless tied to nation-states or parts of them. Particularly as globalised business corporations became more important in funding science, science became correspondingly denationalised. Lakoff, op. cit. (note 15), shows strikingly how this worked out in practice in psychiatry in Argentina.

57 I have not attempted here to conceptualise psychiatric communities within larger national communities as minority groups with their own transnationalising processes and agendas; see, for example, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (eds), Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

58 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Globalisation as Hybridisation’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 45–68. Pieterse uses ‘globalisation’ in the sense of transnationalisation of culture.