Associate Professor Hans Pols

MA York University; PhD University of Pennsylvania
Room 435 Carslaw

+61 2 9351 3610

Hans Pols is interested in the history medicine, in particular the history of psychiatry. He has conducted research into the history of the mental hygiene movement, the treatment for shell shock or nervous breakdown in the armed forces during World War II, and on the history of medicine in the former Dutch East Indies and modern Indonesia.

Current projects

Hans has written several articles on the history of the American mental hygiene movement and on the treatment of war neurosis in the armed forces of Australia, the UK, and the USA. He travels regularly to Indonesia and the Netherlands to conduct research in the history of colonial medicine in the former Dutch East Indies, and the relationship between colonial medical practices and modern medicine in Indonesia.

Grants

ARC Discovery Grant: War, Trauma, and Rehabilitation: The Army, Psychiatry, and World War II [2004-2006]

ARC Discovery Grant: Health and Medicine in the Dutch East Indies: Medical Research, Health Programs, and Colonial Networks of Mediation (2010-2012)

Selected publications

Hans has published on the history of the mental hygiene movement in the United States, research into child development, war neurosis, and the history of medicine in the Dutch East Indies.

• Beyond Clinical Frontiers: The American Mental Hygiene Movement, 1910-1945. International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany and the United States of America to World War Two University of Rochester Press:Rochester (2010) 111-133.
• Die Militarioperation in Tunesien 1942/3 Und Die Neuorientierung Der US-Amerikanischen Militarpyschiatrie. Kreig Und Psychiatrie, 1914-1950 WallsteinVerlag:Germany (2010) 129-152.
• Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics Oxford University Press:New York (2010) 347-362.
• " European Botanists and Physicians, Indigenous Herbal Medicine in the Dutch East Indies, and Colonial Networks of Mediation" East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 3, no.2-3 (2009): 173 - 208
• "The Nature of the Native Mind: Contested Views of Dutch Colonial Psychiatrists in the Former Dutch East Indies." In Psychiatry and Empire, edited by Sloan Malone and Megan Vaughan. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
• "The Development of Psychiatry in Indonesia: From Colonial to Modern Times." International Review of Psychiatry 18, no. 4 (2006): 363-70.
• "Between the Laboratory and Life: Child Development Research in Toronto, 1919-1956." History of Psychology 5, no. 2 (2002): 135-62.
• "Divergences in American Psychiatry during the Depression: Somatic Psychiatry, Community Mental Hygiene, and Social Reconstruction." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37, no. 4 (2001): 369-88.

Areas of teaching and supervision

History of medicine, history of psychiatry, mental hygiene, mental health care, and colonial science and medicine.

Other professional contributions

Hans Pols is editor of Health and History, the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine.