Reflections on the Life and Career of Émigré German-Canadian Psychiatrist Sebastian Klaus Littmann (1931-1986).

OBJECTIVE: This article explores the life and career of Sebastian K. Littmann. He was a foundational figure of the University of Calgary's Department of Psychiatry in his role as its second chair and, before this, as an influential administrator at Toronto's Queen Street Mental Health Centre and Clarke Institute during a transitional period in the 1970s-1980s. According to McGill University's Heinz Lehmann, this transitional period was when the field of psychiatry underwent an identity crisis that threatened to dissolve the discipline and see its functions increasingly filled by counsellors, neurologists, and primary physicians. Littmann's professional background and training in Edinburgh was followed by periods of community work in New York, which-by the time he immigrated to Canada-predisposed him to favour a humane and community-based approach to psychiatric work; this approach encompassed the cultural variations that were increasingly characterizing North America's urban social landscape. His compassionate and progressive approach to treatment was remarkable in light of his troubled and deprived upbringing in Nazi-era Germany. CONCLUSIONS: The present sketch of Littmann's personal and professional biography serves to highlight the ways that major historical events and large-scale migration movements, which affected Central Europe, impacted the development of Canadian psychiatry and, by extension, individual Canadians in the twentieth century.

Climate of doubt: A re-evaluation of Büntgen and Di Cosmo's environmental hypothesis for the Mongol withdrawal from Hungary, 1242 CE.

In their recent article published in the journal Scientific Reports, Büntgen and Di Cosmo have attempted to solve the historical mystery of the sudden Mongol withdrawal from Hungary after a year-long occupation. We cannot share the authors' viewpoint that environmental circumstances contributed to the decision of the Mongols to abandon Hungary since the hypothesis lacks support from environmental, archaeological and historical evidence. Historical source material in particular suggests that the Mongols were able to settle and sustain their herds in Hungary as is clearly stated in a letter by King Bela IV to the pope. The Mongol army arrived in the kingdom at the end of a severe drought, and we present empirical evidence that the abundant rain in the spring of 1242 CE did not worsen but rather improved their prospects for sufficient food supplies and pasturage. The marshy terrain of the Hungarian Plain likely did not precipitate the Mongol withdrawal as the Mongol high command ultimately stationed their main forces around the marshy Volga Delta. In contrast to what Büntgen and Di Cosmo have suggested, we argue that the reasons for the sudden withdrawal cannot be explained largely by environmental factors.

Eugenics ideals, racial hygiene, and the emigration process of German-American neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897-1965).

Biological psychiatry in the early twentieth century was based on interrelated disciplines, such as neurology and experimental biology. Neuropsychiatrist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897-1965) was a product of this interdisciplinary background who showed an ability to adapt to different scientific contexts, first in the field of neuromorphology in Berlin, and later in New York. Nonetheless, having innovative ideas, as Kallmann did, could be an ambiguous advantage, since they could lead to incommensurable scientific views and marginalization in existing research programs. Kallmann followed his Dr. Med. degree (1919) with training periods at the Charité Medical School in Berlin under psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer (1868-1948). Subsequently, he collaborated with Ernst Ruedin (1874-1952), investigating sibling inheritance of schizophrenia and becoming a protagonist of genetic research on psychiatric conditions. In 1936, Kallmann was forced to immigrate to the USA where he published The Genetics of Schizophrenia (1938), based on data he had gathered from the district pathological institutes of Berlin's public health department. Kallmann resumed his role as an international player in biological psychiatry and genetics, becoming president (1952) of the American Society of Human Genetics and Director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1955. While his work was well received by geneticists, the idea of genetic differences barely took hold in American psychiatry, largely because of émigré psychoanalysts who dominated American clinical psychiatry until the 1960s and established a philosophical direction in which genetics played no significant role, being regarded as dangerous in light of Nazi medical atrocities. After all, medical scientists in Nazi Germany had been among the social protagonists of racial hygiene which, under the aegis of Nazi philosophies, replaced medical genetics as the basis for the ideals and application of eugenics.

Ludwig Edelstein (1902-1965): a German historian of medicine in North American exile and the emergence of the modern Hippocratic Oath.

Already emerging as an original thinker in the field of classical philology and history of medicine, German scholar Ludwig Edelstein became one of many scholars who lost his academic position when the National Socialists came to power in early 1933. This paper details his life before and after his difficult transition from Europe to North America, while reviewing the lasting significance of his translation and commentary on the Hippocratic Oath.

Karl Stern (1906-1975).

The forced migration process of German-speaking neurologists and psychiatrists under the Nazis during the 1930s and 40s is often preoccupied solely with "successful" concepts and therapeutic approaches. The case of German-Canadian neurologist Karl Stern (1906-1975) is very instructive, however, since the process of forced migration, for him, proved to be a transitionary process from his former cutting edge work in neuropathology and holist neurology in Germany to clinical psychiatry and the development of the new discipline of geriatric medicine in Canada.