Shell Shock And Medical Culture In First World War Britain

This book provides a thought-provoking exploration into the diagnosis of shell-shock and medical culture in First World War Britain.

This book provides a thought-provoking exploration into the diagnosis of shell-shock and medical culture in First World War Britain.

To the British soldiers of the Great War who heard about it, 'shell shock' was uncanny, amusing and sad. To those who experienced it, the condition was shameful, unjustly stigmatized and life-changing. The first full-length study of the British 'shell shocked' soldiers of the Great War combines social and medical history to investigate the experience of psychological casualties on the Western Front, in hospitals, and through their postwar lives. It also investigates the condition's origin and consequences within British culture.

More than 16,000 Canadian soldiers suffered from shell shock during the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Despite significant interest from historians, we still know relatively little about how it was experienced, diagnosed, treated, and managed in the frontline trenches in the Canadian and British forces. How did soldiers relate to suffering comrades? Did large numbers of shell shock cases affect the outcome of important battles? Was frontline psychiatric treatment as effective as many experts claimed after the war? Were Canadians treated any differently than other Commonwealth soldiers? A Weary Road is the first comprehensive study to address these important questions. Author Mark Osborne Humphries uses research from Canadian, British, and Australian archives, including hundreds of newly available hospital records and patient medical files, to provide a history of war trauma as it was experienced, treated, and managed by ordinary soldiers.

Shell shock achieved a very high political profile in the years 1919-1922. Publications ranging from John Bull to the Morning Post insisted that shell-shocked men should be treated with respect, and the Minister for Health announced that the government was committed to protecting shell-shocked men from the stigma of lunacy. Yet at the same time, many mentally-wounded veterans were struggling with a pension system which was failing to give them security. It is this conflict between the political rhetoric and the lived experience of many wounded veterans that explains why the government was unable to dispel the negative wartime assessment of official shell-shock treatment. There was also a real conflict between the government's wish to forget shell shock whilst memorialising the war and remembering the war dead. As a result of these contradictions, shell shock was not forgotten, on the contrary, the shell-shocked soldier quickly grew to symbolise the confusions and inconsistencies of the Great War.

They Called it Shell Shock provides a new perspective on the psychological reactions to the traumatic experiences of combat. In the Great War, soldiers were incapacitated by traumatic disorders at an epidemic scale that surpassed anything known from previous armed conflicts. Drawing upon individual histories from British and German servicemen, this book illustrates the universal suffering of soldiers involved in this conflict and its often devastating consequences for their mental health. Dr Stefanie Linden explains how shell shock challenged the fabric of pre-war society, including its beliefs about gender (superiority of the male character), class (superiority of the officer class) and scientific progress. She argues that the shell shock epidemic had enduring consequences for the understanding of the human mind and the power that it can exert over the body. The author has analysed over 660 original medical case records from shell-shocked soldiers who were treated at the world-leading neurological/psychiatric institutions of the time: the National Hospital at Queen Square in London, the Charité Psychiatric Department in Berlin and the Jena Military Hospital at Jena/Germany. This is thus the first shell shock book to be based on original case records from both sides of the battle. It includes a rich collection of hitherto unpublished first-hand accounts of life in the trenches and soldiers' traumas. The focal point of the book is the soldier's experience on the battlefield that triggers his nervous breakdown - and the author links this up with the soldiers' biographies and provides a perspective on their pre-war civilian life and experience of the war. She then describes the fate of individual soldiers; their psychological and neurological symptoms; their journey through the system of military hospitals and specialist units at home; and the initially ambivalent response of the medical system. She analyses the external factors that influenced clinical presentations of traumatized soldiers and shows how cultural and political factors can shape mental illness and the reactions of doctors and society. The author argues that the challenge posed by tens of thousands of shell-shocked soldiers and the necessity to maintain the fighting strength of the army eventually led to a modernization of medicine - even resulting in the first formal treatment studies in the history of medicine. "They called it Shell Shock" is also one of the first books to tackle often neglected topics of war history, including desertion, suicide and soldiers' mental illness. Based on her expertise in psychiatry and history of medicine, the author argues that many modern trauma therapies had their root in the medicine of the First World War and that the experience of the shell shock patients and their doctors is still very relevant for the understanding of present-day traumatic diseases.

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.