Michał Adam Palacz - Böcker

Combining global history methods with insights from migration studies, this book discusses refugee integration and challenges the view of medical migration as a “brain drain” of foreign-trained professionals that benefits only the receiving society.This volume looks at the reception of Polish refugee doctors and medical students within the broader context of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in Britain. While in the 1930s and 1940s many British physicians opposed the recognition of foreign medical qualifications, the admission of persecuted physicians from the mainland was advocated on humanitarian grounds by many prominent academics and clinicians who additionally saw in the arrival of scientifically trained Europeans an opportunity to modernize British medicine. The book looks at the changing attitudes towards Polish medical refugees in Britain and adopts Paul Weindling’s “total population approach” that takes into account not only the well-integrated high achievers, but also those who for various reasons were not able to resume successful professional careers in different countries of post-war settlement.Polish Refugee Doctors in Britain will be invaluable to researchers and post-graduate students interested in the history of medicine, migration studies and the Second World War and would also be of interest to medical practitioners and Polish communities in Britain and North America, particularly members of the Polish Medical Association in Great Britain.

This book is a vital exploration of the harrowing stories of mass displacement that took place in the first half of the 20th century from the perspective of forced migrants themselves. The volume brings together 15 interrelated case studies which show how the deportation, evacuation and flight of millions of people as a result of the First World War intensified rather than alleviated ethnic conflicts which culminated in population transfers on an even larger scale during and immediately after the Second World War. While each chapter focuses on a different group of refugees and displaced persons, the text as a whole looks at the experience of forced migration as a complex set of evolving relationships with the receiving society, the homeland, the broader diaspora and other migrant communities living within the same host country. This innovative, four-dimensional model provides an overarching conceptual framework that binds the chapters together within the longer arc of European history.By going beyond the conventional narratives of national victimhood and (un)successful assimilation of refugees, A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe reveals that identities of forced migrants in the first half of the 20th century were individualised, hybrid and constantly reconstructed in response to socioeconomic forces and political pressures. The case studies collected in this volume further suggest that age, gender, social class, educational level and the personal experiences of ‘unwilling nomads’ are more important to the understanding of forced migration history than ethnoreligious identities of victims and perpetrators.