Anthony Babington
Leo Cooper, £16.95, pp 224
ISBN 085052 5624
The failure to compensate psychologically for the trauma of war has been called many things over the years. This important book charts the shifts in attitudes that have accompanied the changing names.
In 1678, a Swiss physician coined the term “nostalgia” to mean a soldier’s fear that he would never see his homeland again. Other early diagnoses included soldier’s heart, battle hysteria, fatigue, and exhaustion. The authorities soon realised, however, that if doctors diagnosed these conditions too readily then armies might disappear. Responding to this threat, the British army forbad the discharge of insane soldiers in 1863.
“Windage” appeared in the American Civil War and was ascribed to shock waves from large shells passing nearby. By then, swords and muzzle loading guns had been replaced by larger explosives and shrapnel. Technological advances, such as the Gatling machine gun (1862), are difficult to appreciate in a world where Kalashnikov rifles are on sale at the nearest bazaar.
The first use of the term “shell-shock” was in 1915 by Charles Myers, of Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps. The war office adopted the term as a “diagnostic classification of officers and men in the British forces caused by their experience in battle.” The problem was to differentiate it from malingering, so a diagnosis of NYDN (not yet diagnosed nervous) was introduced. By the end of the first world war, 80 000 British soldiers had been diagnosed with shell-shock. Some 346 had been executed by firing squad for desertion or cowardice.
Read this book if you are interested in the response to injury nowadays labelled post-traumatic stress disorder. Its author was rehabilitated in Cairns’s neurosurgical unit at Oxford for injuries received in the second world war. Although disabled, he trained in law after the war and became a judge.
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Rating: ★★★