Anastasiia Zaplatina
New York Academy of Medicine
Please join the NYAM Library for a presentation by our 2023 Klemperer Fellow in the History of Medicine, Anastasiia Zaplatina, on research she conducted using the Library’s resources.
There is a common and to a great extent legitimate perception of Soviet psychiatry as a punitive tool used by the state to discipline unwelcome members of society. However, numerous reports found in the collection of Joseph Wortis in the NYAM Library show that Soviet psychiatry in the 1950s and 1960s was an object of a constant interest and admiration for American psychiatrists.
The presentation will address the following questions: Why did American scholars take such a favorable position toward their colleagues during the time of the most tense confrontation between the two superpowers? Was such a warm response from their foreign counterparts realized and instrumentalized by Soviet physicians, especially through the lens of the overarching ideological and propaganda goals? Can we say that psychiatric research in the Soviet Union was one of the export goods, which together with ballet, chess, and ice hockey, was used to overcome the “Soviet superiority complex” in the cultural Cold War?
About the Speaker:
Anastasiia Zaplatina has been a PhD Student at the Bielefeld University in Germany since 2019. She studied History at the State University in St. Petersburg and received her Master’s degree at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her PhD work is supported with a stipend from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. As a fellow at the NYAM Library, she has been working on her project on the American-Soviet medical exchanges in the 1940s-1960s.