Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America

“What were the main despair issues among émigré neuroscientists and psychiatrists in North America in the 1930s and 1940s?” “How can it be explained that émigré medical researchers faced resistance to their holistic approaches in Canada and the US, after scores of American scientists and scholars had trained in Europe in the 19th and early 20th century?” “Why did these physicians and scientific investigators particularly address the condition of psychiatric patients, after the mentally ill had been treated so insufficiently during the 19th century?” These and many other questions were raised after Dr. Stahnisch’s talk on January 15th, 2026, at the Huntington Library and the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine in Los Angeles. He had been invited to share some perspectives on his recent book, entitled “Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989." Dr. Stahnisch showed how the process of forced migration most often constituted an end or at least a change to the career patterns of this group of medical professionals. Case examples included the neuroophthalmologist Caesar Hirsch (1880–1940), neuropsychologist Eva Goldstein-Rothmann (1897–1960), neuropathologist Karl Stern (1906–1975), and neurologist Wilhelm G. Niederland (1904–1993), while emphasizing the adaptation and integration problems of these émigrés, their different cultural paradigms regarding science and medicine, as well as gender-based perspectives towards forced migration in STEM.