Introduction to Special Issue: Geneses, organizations and transformations of psychiatric epidemiology

Recent historiography has revealed a growing interest in the developments of psychiatric epidemiology. This volume aims to explicitly tackle the problem of transforming a diversity of knowledge into a structured scientific unit. Furthermore, it aims to answer this by bringing together historical studies that demonstrate how epistemic authority has led to the hierarchization of knowledge and the institutionalization of psychiatric epidemiology. Interdisciplinary research teams are traced back in history, and their organization is interrogated. Tracing the history of psychiatric epidemiology involves an exploration of disciplinary divisions of labour, such as how survey methods are based on theoretical frameworks, how research programmes are regulated with political and moral ideals, and how the wider public recognizes public health expertise.

The Stirling County Study: a case study of interdisciplinarity and its effects on the history of psychiatric epidemiology

Epidemiology of mental disorders emerged in the post-1945 era at the intersections of different areas of knowledge. Given its ambitions, the Stirling County Study provides an instructive case study. It is also a good example of how the epidemiology applied methodological skills from social sciences. This paper aims, first, to reconstruct one of the first episodes in the development of psychiatric epidemiology. Its second purpose is to provide a detailed description of interdisciplinarity at work, and to examine its effects. After explaining some of the major features of the Stirling County Study, I emphasize the links between some of the first results, particularly regarding young people as a population at risk, and the job market after the Great Depression.

'A proposal for research in the epidemiology of psychiatric disorders', by Alexander H Leighton (1950)

The Classic Text is an outline of the Stirling County Study as conceptualized by Alexander H Leighton. It was first presented at a conference held in 1949 organized by the Milbank Memorial Fund, an American philanthropic foundation. The meeting brought together 30-40 experts from across North America. Leighton succinctly explained his frame of reference for the epidemiology of mental disorders and the methodology of the community-based study he conducted in Nova Scotia. The introduction to the text explains contextual points, certain specificities of Leighton's framework, and the discussions that surrounded it, largely dominated by a group of Harvard professors, including Erich Lindemann and John E Gordon.

Cross-cultural, transnational or interdisciplinary? Eric Wittkower's psychosomatic medicine and transcultural psychiatry in historical context

This article traces the career, scientific achievements, and emigration of the Berlin-born physician, psychoanalyst, and psychosomatic researcher Eric Wittkower. Trained in Berlin and practicing internal medicine, he became persecuted by the Nazi regime and, after fleeing Germany via Switzerland, continued his professional career in the United Kingdom, where he turned to psychosomatic medicine and worked in the service of the British Army during World War II. After two decades of service in the UK, Wittkower joined McGill University in Canada. His increasingly interdisciplinary work contributed to the establishment of the new research field of transcultural psychiatry. Finally the paper provides a detailed history of the beginning of the section of transcultural psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute.

Femoral fracture during breech vaginal delivery: A case report

Femoral fracture is a rare but significant foetal injury, more frequent and likely to happen when the foetus is malpositioned or in a breech presentation. Cesarian section does not appear to be protective and all recent publications report cases occurring during cesarian section. We report a case that occurred in a vaginal delivery of a single footling breech presentation. This complication allows us to remind that femur fracture is a complication of breech delivery whatever the modality. The prognosis is good with early diagnosis.

Historicizing transcultural psychiatry: people, epistemic objects, networks, and practices

The history of transcultural psychiatry has recently attracted much historical attention, including a workshop in March 2016 in which an international panel of scholars met at the Maison de Sciences de l'Homme Paris-Nord (MSH-PN). Papers from this workshop are presented here. By conceiving of transcultural psychiatry as a dynamic social field that frames its knowledge claims around epistemic objects that are specific to the field, and by focusing on the ways that concepts within this field are used to organize intellectual work, several themes are explored that draw this field into the historiography of psychiatry. Attention is paid to the organization of networks and publications, and to important actors within the field who brought about significant developments in the colonial and post-colonial conceptions of mental illness.

Eric Wittkower and the foundation of Montréal's Transcultural Psychiatry Research Unit after World War II

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.

[Natural or interactive kinds? The transient mental disorders in Ian Hacking's lectures at the Collège de France (2000-2006)]

The concepts developed by Ian Hacking during his lectures at the Collège de France (2000-2006) have provided an important contribution to the debates within the field of philosophy of psychiatry. Professor at the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts after Michel Foucault, Hacking is the author of a reflection on the classification of mental disorders, which arises from the problem of the natural kinds. In order to explain the case studies developed in Hacking's Paris lectures, we first go back to the definition of a series of concepts, then we discuss the status of his scientific metaphors. Finally we analyze the relationship between the notions, respectively, of "transient mental illness" and "culture-bound syndrome". We emphasize that the latter derives from the Canadian transcultural psychiatry.

Reconstituer une sociabilité savante à partir du fonds d’archives du Centre Hospitalier Henri Ey de Bonneval : réseaux et leurres induits par le travail archivistique

Le Centre Hospitalier Henri Ey de Bonneval (Eure-et-Loir, région Centre de la France) est connu dans l’histoire de la psychiatrie pour une série de colloques qui a réuni des figures centrales du champ de la santé mentale à partir des années 1940. Leurs contributions ont donné lieu à deux volumes, Le Problème de la psychogenèse des névroses et des psychoses (1950) et L’Inconscient (1966), où l’on retrouve à la fois des exposés systématiques et une partie des débats qui animaient dans le passé les médecins psychiatres, neurologues, psychologues, psychanalystes et philosophes français. À partir des archives de la revue L’Évolution psychiatrique, nous examinerons ce réseau en nous demandant s’il peut aider à reconstituer la vie intellectuelle des psychiatres français dans la société d’après-guerre, au fil des réformes des études médicales (Réformes Debré et Faure, 1958-1968).

On the history of cultural psychiatry: Georges Devereux, Henri Ellenberger, and the psychological treatment of Native Americans in the 1950s

Henri Ellenberger (1905-1993) wrote the first French-language synthesis of transcultural psychiatry ("Ethno-psychiatrie") for the French Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale in 1965. His work casts new light on the early development of transcultural psychiatry in relation to scientific communities and networks, particularly on the role of Georges Devereux (1908-1985). The Ellenberger archives offer the possibility of comparing published texts with archival ones to create a more nuanced account of the history of transcultural psychiatry, and notably of the psychological treatment of Native Americans. This paper examines some key moments in the intellectual trajectories of Devereux and Ellenberger, including Devereux's dispute with Ackerknecht, the careers of Devereux and Ellenberger as therapists at the Menninger Foundation (Topeka, Kansas) in the 1950s, and their respective positions in the research network developed by McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) with the newsletter Transcultural Research in Mental Health Problems Finally, I consider their ties to other important figures in this field as it transitioned from colonial medicine to academic medicine, including Roger Bastide (France), Henri Collomb and the Ortigues (France and Africa), as well as Eric Wittkower and Brian Murphy (Canada) and Alexander Leighton (United States and Canada).

[Reconstructing a Scholarly Network from the Bonneval Hospital Collections: Relationships and Misconceptions Derived from Historical Archives]

The French psychiatric hospital Henri Ey in Bonneval (Eure-et-Loir, Central France) is known in the history of psychiatry for a series of conferences, which brought together several key figures in the mental health field in the 1940s. The conference sessions have been published in two major volumes: Le Problème de la psychogenèse des névroses et des psychoses (The Problem of the Psychogenesis of Neuroses and Psychoses, 1950), and L'Inconscient (The Unconscious, 1966). The proceedings consist of theoretical essays and minutes of the intellectual discussions between French psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers. We will analyze this network through an investigation into the archives of the journal L'Évolution psychiatrique (The Evolution of Psychiatry) in order to reconstruct the history of the intellectual life of French psychiatrists in postwar society, in the course of successive reforms in medical education (Debré and Faure Reforms, 1958-1968).

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La catégorie de psychose débutante fait partie des classifications médicales usuelles, à la fois au seuil des savoirs qui constituent l'ossature du champ de la santé mentale, et catégorie normative, susceptible de donner une signification médicale à un ensemble de conduites d'abord identifiées comme bizarreries de comportements, propos, émotions et états mentaux étranges, puis requalifiées en tant que prodromes d'une maladie mentale. De plus, elle fait l'objet de nombreuses publications depuis les années 1990, sans que l'on sache quelles furent vraiment les pratiques de santé dans le passé, avant d'être un objet de protocoles standardisés de recherche, de prévention et de soin. En nous appuyant principalement sur les archives de l'Hôpital de Bonneval, et en établissant des rapprochements et des différences avec d'autres hôpitaux français et allemands dans les années 1950 à 1980, nous donnons des exemples de son maniement dans la clinique, à partir d'un type de sources encore peu utilisées dans l'histoire de la seconde moitié du 20e siècle, les dossiers médicaux. Ce cadre étant posé, nous procédons à l'analyse des enchaînements entre les certificats, les premiers entretiens cliniques, le récit d'anamnèse, la construction du diagnostic, les indications de traitement, le pronostic, etc., autant d'indices diachroniques qui offrent un lieu d'observation des savoirs et savoir-faire impliqués – ou pas. En effet, il ne s'agit pas tant ici d'évaluer l'impact de certaines doctrines que d'examiner quels sont les signes cliniques et les dichotomies conceptuelles sur lesquels les cliniciens s'appuient, et de questionner l'usage d'outils comme les tests psychologiques. On peut alors dégager le constat que la clinique n'est pas seulement une production de signes objectifs, mais que les symptômes subjectifs font aussi partie des pratiques de santé en psychiatrie, à partir du moment où elle en fait une catégorie normative, intermédiaire entre des conduites atypiques et un diagnostic caractérisé, comme la schizophrénie.

[Henri Ellenberger, Henri Ey and the Traité de Psychiatrie in the "Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale": an American career under the auspices of the "Evolution Psychiatrique"]

Henri Ellenberger, psychiatrist and historian, experienced a decisive period in his career in the early fifties of the last century. Educated in France, intern at Sainte-Anne Hospital, he was working in Switzerland after the war and then tried to move to the United States. It was during his participation in the French group "l'Evolution Psychiatrique" that he happened to contribute to the treatise of psychiatry (1955) of the French medical and surgical encyclopaedia ("EMC") and organise an observation trip to the United States. He was supported at that time by Henri Ey, key figure of French psychiatry. While going back to his career, we would like to emphasise on his comments about the "Psychotherapy of schizophrenia". Even though later Ellenberger became a well-known researcher in North America, it is more a question for us to discuss the scientific ambition he had in this particular context of a French learned society as a member of "l'Evolution Psychiatrique" and as a psychiatrist formerly intern from the "Hôpitaux psychiatriques de la Seine" (Parisian district).