Racial experiments in psychiatry’s provinces: Richard S Lyman and his colleagues in China and the American South,1932–51

Abstract

The worldwide expansion of psychiatry as a science at times followed pathways already laid by Christian medical missions to cultures seen as disadvantaged by sponsors. Interracial contacts were one outcome, and racial issues gained visibility in psychiatric inquiry and treatment. Richard S. Lyman gathered socially diverse psychiatric teams at Peking Union Medical College in the 1930s and Duke University in the 1940s, both programs funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Bingham Dai, a Chinese-born theorist and therapist, and Leo Alexander, Holocaust refugee and later medical investigator for the Nuremberg prosecutors, worked with Lyman at both sites. These itinerant professionals repeatedly struggled to comprehend and influence localities. Lyman’s liberal aim to integrate psychiatry succeeded better in China than in segregated North Carolina.