A psychiatrist’s life divided by exile: Reidentifying Wilhelm Mayer (1887–1956), author of the 1921 follow-up study of Paraphrenia

This article reidentifies Wilhelm Mayer, author of the 1921 follow-up study of Kraepelin's cases of paraphrenia, and reconstructs his professional life across its German and American phases. Although Mayer's 1921 paper is still cited in the history of the concept of paraphrenia, the background of its author long remained obscure, and in recent literature he has at times been identified as Wilhelm Mayer-Gross, an attribution that provided the starting point for the present investigation. By collating published sources, dissertation records, obituaries, professional-society records, immigration records and local historical materials, this study examined whether the Mayer who worked in Tübingen and Munich was the same person as the William/Wilhelm Mayer who emigrated to the United States in 1936 and practised in New York. The evidence indicates that they were the same person: Wilhelm Mayer (1887-1956), who worked within the network linking Kraepelin, Gaupp and Brodmann before going into exile in the United States. A key piece of evidence is the identification of a 1911 dissertation on the prognosis of general paresis, rather than the 1901 dissertation previously attributed to him. Mayer's case shows how exile fragmented the documentary record of a career spanning Germany and the United States. His American career was predominantly clinical but continued to include scholarly work; nevertheless, the separation of the German and American records made it difficult for later historians of psychiatry to recognise them as belonging to the same person. The article thus offers a case for rethinking the history of the post-1933 emigration of German-speaking psychiatrists and neurologists in terms of fragmented professional careers and the asymmetry of documentary records.