Lecture: A Brief History of Shell-Shock
Notes on Shell Shock
We’ve spoken a little about myth-makers in this course, and one of the ideas that came up recently was the role something like Greek Mythology may play into our present conceptions of war and the myth of war. The old Greek writer Herodotus, who was live for the Greek-Persian wars around 2500 years ago, actually leads us to our present topic for today, which is shell shock. I turn to a shell-shock historian, Anthony Babington, because he sees shell shock coming out of some writing Herodotus left.
First a word about shell shock, because it’s not a term that’s popular anymore today, mostly because the condition it describes is no longer called shell shock, but PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The phrase shell shock comes from the term British psychologists used to describe the condition of all these British soldiers returning home from the first world war with tremors and mental illness, nightmares and strange, persistent fears. Whether or not shell shock and PTSD are the same things is something we’ll have to talk about later.
In any case, it may have been Herodotus who first recorded this condition, and thanks to him, we can link something that happened after a battle 2500 years ago with a battle that occurred one hundred years ago, and, maybe later in the semester, we can possibly begin to see connections to a battle that took place last week. In an account of a battle, Herodotus writes that one fighter, an Epizelus, suddenly lost his sight in middle of the battle, even though nobody struck him, and even though nobody injured him. He was blind the rest of his life.
Sometime later, in that vague time and place we call the 17th century, European doctors noticed that soldiers returning from the 30 Years War had this weird illness when they got back: basically, they were really depressed. A Swiss doctor named Johannes Hofer wrote about this in 1678 and called it, strangely enough, “nostalgia.” In what proved to be a correct assumption, he located the illness in the brain, not the body, and wrote that its symptoms were
“a continuing melancholy, incessant thinking of home, disturbed
sleep or insomnia, weakness, loss of appetite, anxiety, cardiac
palpitation, stupor, and fever.”
Just like any good doctor, he proscribed that the soldier get home and take narcotics.
For awhile, it appeared in books that nostalgia was a Swiss problem—it was a peculiar longing they had for their homeland. The problem came when more and more young men fighting in wars for their countries came back with this perplexing homesickness. Doctors said that even when these young French and Austrian boys would return home, they would be “sad” and “indifferent.” Doctors thought it was an army problem.
By the age of Napoleon and his European conquests, the French surgeon Dominique Larrey said it was pure insanity, involving soldier’s fantasies for a homelife that, he believed, bore no actual resemblance to their actual homes. Meanwhile, whatever was affecting these poor boys was, in some cases, pretty bad. Some stopped talking. Others also went blind. Some actually became paralyzed and never moved again—ever again. Some became incoherent. In one instance, we have record that a Dr. Patton at the University Hospital of Wales was treating a soldier fresh from the Peninsular War (1808-1814) when he went blind suddenly. Dr. Patton presumed that it was because his brain acted on his eyes as “an unconscious attempt to ‘shut out’ the sights of mutilation” he saw as soldiers came back from the war with horrific injuries.
Some people, of course, just didn’t believe it. A doctor named Hector Gavin (1821: Feigned and Fictive Diseases) spoke for many when he said these soldiers were making up these illnesses because they didn’t want to fight. The only other possibility, he wrote, is that “fear seems to in some instances to have a powerful and almost wonderful depressing effect; individuals are sometimes found to sink under its influence.” In World War I, an unknown but countless number of soldiers were shot by their own armies for refusing to enter battle. Whether they were cowards or ill remains unknown, too, but they died all the same.
By the time of the Civil War in the United States, the idea of this nostalgia, or a “continuous longing for home,” remained the assumption of choice by army doctors. Many remained unsympathetic to these soldiers, but the number of people suffering from its effects continued. The Managers of the Government Hospital for the Insane reported that in 1864 83% of the male patients entering the hospital were veterans, and that 60% never returned to sanity. It was about this time doctors came up with a new theory to explain these causalities. They called it “windage,” and said it came from soldiers who happened to be standing to close next to bullets, bombs, or cannon balls. These projectiles didn’t hit him, but they left him incapacitated (Civil War Surgeon Huntington).
It wasn’t Army Surgeons who had any new answers. New answers came from psychologists and neurologists, two fields that were still relatively new then. One of the guys who saw the Civil War up close at a Philadelphia hospital was Silas Mitchell, and after thinking about what he saw, he wrote in 1872 that
“the gravest of the instant consequences of nerve injuries is that which is known as
‘shock.’ This is commonly described as a condition in which the patient becomes cold,
faint, and trembling; the pulse is small and fluttering; there is great mental depression
and disquietude; incoherence of speech and thought; the surface becomes covered by a
cold sweat; there is nausea, perhaps vomiting, and relaxation of the sphincters.”
His new theory of ‘shock,’ which was a nervous condition, came together with other popular theories of nervous disorders affecting people in those decades of the 19th century.
Back then, people were getting freaked out by everything. Trains were going really fast. Electricity was really scary. People were calling these new things part of modern life, but people didn’t know whether to be happy or scared. These new conditions suffered by soldiers were also showing up in people who had been in train accidents. A London doctor named John Erichsen studied things like train crashes, and the people who remained freaked out after being in accidents, even if they weren’t physically hurt. He called it “railway spine.” A neurologist named George Beard called the whole bag of problems “neurasthenia,” which meant nervous exhaustion. Some people began to call the problem “hysteria,” and one of those guys was a French specialist named Jean Charcot. And in 1885, an eccentric 29-year old student of his became completely wrapped up in these ideas, and spent the rest of his life studying it.
His name was Sigmund Freud. His big idea was that if you really wanted to figure out why people were so freaked out and anxious, you needed to get them to talk. And if they were able to tell you the right stories, you could possibly even cure them. In fact, he believed talking was the cure. He called it “free association,” and he thought that if you just kept talking, about your dreams, your family, your lovers, your wishes, or your fears, you would eventually figure out what was bothering you. He didn’t’ care; he wanted you to get out your secret thoughts and memories; he came to believe all those secret thoughts, which were mostly about sex, were the foundation of human identity. His technique, which he eventually turned into psychoanalysis, would become the most influential and controversial psychology of the 20th century.
And Freud brings us to World War I, which devastated him. He did his best to explain why so many people died in such horrible ways all through the 1920s, just like everyone else. All the boys coming home whacked out were called “hysterical” or “neurasthenics”. But since shell-bombs were the weapon of choice out in the trenches as early as 1914, it became known as shell shock. As the course goes on, we’ll trace how this idea changed and evolved into what it is today.
We’ve spoken a little about myth-makers in this course, and one of the ideas that came up recently was the role something like Greek Mythology may play into our present conceptions of war and the myth of war. The old Greek writer Herodotus, who was live for the Greek-Persian wars around 2500 years ago, actually leads us to our present topic for today, which is shell shock. I turn to a shell-shock historian, Anthony Babington, because he sees shell shock coming out of some writing Herodotus left.
First a word about shell shock, because it’s not a term that’s popular anymore today, mostly because the condition it describes is no longer called shell shock, but PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The phrase shell shock comes from the term British psychologists used to describe the condition of all these British soldiers returning home from the first world war with tremors and mental illness, nightmares and strange, persistent fears. Whether or not shell shock and PTSD are the same things is something we’ll have to talk about later.
In any case, it may have been Herodotus who first recorded this condition, and thanks to him, we can link something that happened after a battle 2500 years ago with a battle that occurred one hundred years ago, and, maybe later in the semester, we can possibly begin to see connections to a battle that took place last week. In an account of a battle, Herodotus writes that one fighter, an Epizelus, suddenly lost his sight in middle of the battle, even though nobody struck him, and even though nobody injured him. He was blind the rest of his life.
Sometime later, in that vague time and place we call the 17th century, European doctors noticed that soldiers returning from the 30 Years War had this weird illness when they got back: basically, they were really depressed. A Swiss doctor named Johannes Hofer wrote about this in 1678 and called it, strangely enough, “nostalgia.” In what proved to be a correct assumption, he located the illness in the brain, not the body, and wrote that its symptoms were
“a continuing melancholy, incessant thinking of home, disturbed
sleep or insomnia, weakness, loss of appetite, anxiety, cardiac
palpitation, stupor, and fever.”
Just like any good doctor, he proscribed that the soldier get home and take narcotics.
For awhile, it appeared in books that nostalgia was a Swiss problem—it was a peculiar longing they had for their homeland. The problem came when more and more young men fighting in wars for their countries came back with this perplexing homesickness. Doctors said that even when these young French and Austrian boys would return home, they would be “sad” and “indifferent.” Doctors thought it was an army problem.
By the age of Napoleon and his European conquests, the French surgeon Dominique Larrey said it was pure insanity, involving soldier’s fantasies for a homelife that, he believed, bore no actual resemblance to their actual homes. Meanwhile, whatever was affecting these poor boys was, in some cases, pretty bad. Some stopped talking. Others also went blind. Some actually became paralyzed and never moved again—ever again. Some became incoherent. In one instance, we have record that a Dr. Patton at the University Hospital of Wales was treating a soldier fresh from the Peninsular War (1808-1814) when he went blind suddenly. Dr. Patton presumed that it was because his brain acted on his eyes as “an unconscious attempt to ‘shut out’ the sights of mutilation” he saw as soldiers came back from the war with horrific injuries.
Some people, of course, just didn’t believe it. A doctor named Hector Gavin (1821: Feigned and Fictive Diseases) spoke for many when he said these soldiers were making up these illnesses because they didn’t want to fight. The only other possibility, he wrote, is that “fear seems to in some instances to have a powerful and almost wonderful depressing effect; individuals are sometimes found to sink under its influence.” In World War I, an unknown but countless number of soldiers were shot by their own armies for refusing to enter battle. Whether they were cowards or ill remains unknown, too, but they died all the same.
By the time of the Civil War in the United States, the idea of this nostalgia, or a “continuous longing for home,” remained the assumption of choice by army doctors. Many remained unsympathetic to these soldiers, but the number of people suffering from its effects continued. The Managers of the Government Hospital for the Insane reported that in 1864 83% of the male patients entering the hospital were veterans, and that 60% never returned to sanity. It was about this time doctors came up with a new theory to explain these causalities. They called it “windage,” and said it came from soldiers who happened to be standing to close next to bullets, bombs, or cannon balls. These projectiles didn’t hit him, but they left him incapacitated (Civil War Surgeon Huntington).
It wasn’t Army Surgeons who had any new answers. New answers came from psychologists and neurologists, two fields that were still relatively new then. One of the guys who saw the Civil War up close at a Philadelphia hospital was Silas Mitchell, and after thinking about what he saw, he wrote in 1872 that
“the gravest of the instant consequences of nerve injuries is that which is known as
‘shock.’ This is commonly described as a condition in which the patient becomes cold,
faint, and trembling; the pulse is small and fluttering; there is great mental depression
and disquietude; incoherence of speech and thought; the surface becomes covered by a
cold sweat; there is nausea, perhaps vomiting, and relaxation of the sphincters.”
His new theory of ‘shock,’ which was a nervous condition, came together with other popular theories of nervous disorders affecting people in those decades of the 19th century.
Back then, people were getting freaked out by everything. Trains were going really fast. Electricity was really scary. People were calling these new things part of modern life, but people didn’t know whether to be happy or scared. These new conditions suffered by soldiers were also showing up in people who had been in train accidents. A London doctor named John Erichsen studied things like train crashes, and the people who remained freaked out after being in accidents, even if they weren’t physically hurt. He called it “railway spine.” A neurologist named George Beard called the whole bag of problems “neurasthenia,” which meant nervous exhaustion. Some people began to call the problem “hysteria,” and one of those guys was a French specialist named Jean Charcot. And in 1885, an eccentric 29-year old student of his became completely wrapped up in these ideas, and spent the rest of his life studying it.
His name was Sigmund Freud. His big idea was that if you really wanted to figure out why people were so freaked out and anxious, you needed to get them to talk. And if they were able to tell you the right stories, you could possibly even cure them. In fact, he believed talking was the cure. He called it “free association,” and he thought that if you just kept talking, about your dreams, your family, your lovers, your wishes, or your fears, you would eventually figure out what was bothering you. He didn’t’ care; he wanted you to get out your secret thoughts and memories; he came to believe all those secret thoughts, which were mostly about sex, were the foundation of human identity. His technique, which he eventually turned into psychoanalysis, would become the most influential and controversial psychology of the 20th century.
And Freud brings us to World War I, which devastated him. He did his best to explain why so many people died in such horrible ways all through the 1920s, just like everyone else. All the boys coming home whacked out were called “hysterical” or “neurasthenics”. But since shell-bombs were the weapon of choice out in the trenches as early as 1914, it became known as shell shock. As the course goes on, we’ll trace how this idea changed and evolved into what it is today.
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