Polish Refugee Doctors in Britain : War, Migration and the Globalisation of Medicine

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.

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.