A number of forthcoming articles, now available online, in History of Psychiatry may interest AHP readers. Titles, authors, and abstracts below.
“Eric Wittkower and the foundation of Montréal’s Transcultural Psychiatry Research Unit after World War II,” by Emmanuel Delille. Abstract:
Eric Wittkower founded McGill University’s Transcultural Psychiatry Unit in 1955. One year later, he started the first international newsletter in this academic field: Transcultural Psychiatry. However, at the beginning of his career Wittkower gave no signs that he would be interested in social sciences and psychiatry. This paper describes the historical context of the post-war period, when Wittkower founded the research unit in Montréal. I focus on the history of scientific networks and the circulation of knowledge, and particularly on the exchanges between the French- and English-speaking academic cultures in North America and Europe. Because the history of transcultural psychiatry is a transnational history par excellence, this leads necessarily to the question of the reception of this academic field abroad.
“The politics and practice of Thomas Adeoye Lambo: towards a post-colonial history of transcultural psychiatry,” by Matthew M Heaton. Abstract:
This article traces the career of Thomas Adeoye Lambo, the first European-trained psychiatrist of indigenous Nigerian (Yoruba) background and one of the key contributors to the international development of transcultural psychiatry from the 1950s to the 1980s. The focus on Lambo provides some political, cultural and geographical balance to the broader history of transcultural psychiatry by emphasizing the contributions to transcultural psychiatric knowledge that have emerged from a particular non-western context. At the same time, an examination of Lambo’s legacy allows historians to see the limitations of transcultural psychiatry’s influence over time. Ultimately, this article concludes that the history of transcultural psychiatry might have more to tell us about the politics of the ‘transcultural’ than the practice of ‘psychiatry’ in post-colonial contexts.
“Abrupt treatments of hysteria during World War I, 1914–18,” by AD (Sandy) Macleod. Abstract: Continue reading Transcultural Psychiatry, Hysteria, and More!