14 Emmanuel Delille, one of the winners of the Dimitrije Pivnicki Award 2014, is a historian, member of the Institute for History of Medicine Berlin and associate researcher at Centre Marc Bloch (a French institute for social sciences associated with the Humboldt University Berlin). One of his major interests is the history of psychiatry; including intellectual networks and comparative history between France and Germany. He is also interested in the history of epidemiological methods and the shared history (“histoire croisée”) of medicine and anthropology in the 20th century. Within this field, he is currently researching the history of cross-cultural psychiatry for his up-coming book. he subject will be a case study of the circulation of knowledge between Montreal and Paris, and between the French and the English-speaking scientific communities. T he topic of my research is the history of transcultural psychiatry (“ethnopsychiatrie” in French) after the Second World War. he best-known protagonist in this field is certainly Georges Devereux (1908-1985), author of Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (1951), which was also presented in the film: Jimmy P. (Desplechin, 2013). Devereux built a career as an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst, first in the U.S., then in France in the 1960’s. In addition, one could name dozens of other scientists who were involved in transcultural psychiatry in the 1940s – working with Native Americans on reserves, or with Japanese Americans in internment camps during the Second World War. hese researchers, trained in anthropology and medicine, started the first epidemiological studies in mental health and wrote several monographs into the 1960’s. Indeed, the period of the Second World War and the Cold War was an important one for this field, particularly in the universities located at the boundary between the French and English-speaking scientific communities: e.g. Buffalo, Columbia and Cornell in New York State; Harvard in Massachusetts; Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia; and McGill University and l’Université de Montréal in Québec. he latter are located in Montreal and they constitute the ideal location to observe the “transition” (see: Alice Bullard) between ethnocentric or colonial psychiatry, and academic cultural psychiatry endowed with specialized university training and the study of migrant populations. But first, a definition: “cultural psychiatry concerns itself with the mentally ill in relation to their cultural environment within the confines of a given cultural unit, whereas the term transcultural psychiatry denotes that the vista of the observer extends beyond the scope of one cultural unit to another” (1963). We owe this definition to Eric Wittkower (1899-1983), head of transcultural psychiatry at McGill University, where the first transcultural psychiatry programme in a university was established in 1955. Wittkower was born into a German Jewish family and received his training at the Faculty of Medicine in Berlin, where he specialised in internal medicine. As a result of the 1933 Anti-Jewish Law (Gesetze zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), Wittkower lost his position and left for London. He became a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and international specialist in psychosomatic medicine. In 1951, he joined McGill University’s Department of Psychiatry, located within the Allan Memorial Institute. In 1956, together with the anthropologist Jacob Fried, Wittkower edited the international newsletter Transcultural Research in Mental Health Problems. This publication allowed Wittkower and his colleagues to collect information from all over the world, develop teaching methods and establish training in transcultural psychiatry in a university setting. What is particularly interesting is that faculty members and students had backgrounds in medicine and the social sciences, and came from both the French and English scientific communities in Montreal. Around 1959, Wittkower hired a series of new collaborators at McGill. Two significant figures were Brian Murphy (1915–1987) and Henri Ellenberger (1905-1993). The former was trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh and, after the Second World War, became a renowned epidemiologist. Traditionally, this discipline dealt with infectious germs and contagious illnesses. Psychiatric epidemiology, on the other hand, emerged in the post-war era during a fecund period in which social scientists were increasingly consulted in order to understand chronic illnesses. In 1945 Murphy worked for the Red Cross and for the United Nations Refugee Resettlement Association (UNRRA), and International Refugee Organisation (IRO), studying the psychiatric problems of refugees awaiting their journey to Israel, Australia and England from transit camps A shared history of epidemiology and transcultural psychiatry: Circulation of knowledge or impact of international scientific mobility? By Emmanuel Delille