The decades around 1900 were a crucial period in the making of the various national systems of health services, as well as the formation of the modern medical and social sciences. The field of psychiatry and mental health care can be understood as located at the intersection of these spheres. Here, concepts, practices, and institutions emerged that marked responses to the challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and the formation of the nation-state. Psychiatry had a considerable impact on the modes of perception and evaluation, and on the patterns of action toward contemporary social concerns and political issues. These psychiatric responses were locally distinctive, and yet at the same time they established, in part, influential models with an international impact.

This volume addresses two important topics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. The essays deal with the transformation of psychiatry into one of the most contested and influential modern sciences; and they link this focus to broader issues of international relations and transfers of concepts, practices, personnel, as well as funds in a context of rising internationalism and nationalism.

For instance, an orientation toward new career opportunities in the United States by European physicians in the context of innovative and flexible institutional structures and systems of funding may be documented for the 1920s; yet this orientation has found almost no attention in the historiography of psychiatry.