They Called It Shell Shock: Combat Stress In The First World War

Wolverhampton Military Studies

by Stefanie Linden

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 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 It includes a rich collection of hitherto unpublished first-hand accounts of life in the trenches and soldiers’ traumas.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.

Genres: World War I

272 pages, Hardcover

Published February 22, 2017

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

On 4 October 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, a machine gunner from the Royal Fusiliers called James S. was buried alive by a shell explosion. He found himself trapped underground with eleven comrades, now all dead. When he was finally dug out, six hours later, he was blind, deaf, dumb and paralysed from the waist down. There was nothing physiologically wrong with him; his mind had just exited from the whole situation.

At exactly the same time, on the opposite lines, a German pioneer called Franz B. had gone into a panic from the endless air raids and shelling: he fell to the ground, started convulsing in epileptic-style fits, and did not regain consciousness for two hours.

James ended up in the National Hospital in Queen Square; Franz at the Charité in Berlin. Now Stefanie Linden, a psychiatrist and historian, has pored through the archives of these pioneering psychiatric hospitals to understand how traumatic disorders were dealt with in the First World War.

It's a fascinating and well written study, which doesn't attempt to draw any grandiose conclusions from the material – the case studies themselves are the main attraction, and many of them have never been looked at before.

Psychiatric doctors don't have a great reputation in this period: one of the key characters at Queen Square, Dr Lewis Yealland, features as an icon of cruelty in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, forever running unnecessary electroshock treatments and trying to get men back to the front line as soon as possible. Actually, though, he and his colleagues emerge in a much more sympathetic light here and, as Linden shows, they often bent over backwards to make sure the men they treated were kept from frontline duty, even when some degree of malingering was suspected.

It's sometimes assumed (by me, for one) that ‘shell shock’ is just a historical term for post-traumatic stress disorder, but that's not the case – or at least, the crossovers between these two terms are still being actively investigated. What's interesting is the way people react to trauma in such different ways at different times and places – shell shock was very different from the traumatic disorders of the Second World War, and the ‘PTSD’ of Vietnam bears little resemblance to how patients present from more recent military conflicts. Clearly, on some level, symptoms are being (‘mostly subconsciously’) ‘selected’ from some culturally-determined options which change over time.

This is a pretty obscure book from a small publisher and it hasn't been widely shelved here, but I hope it finds its way into bigger histories – it's a fascinating sidelight on an area that, it seems, has often been misrepresented by other historians. Not to mention another occasion to reflect on the endless unknowability of the human brain.

[Can · Rating 4 out of 5]

As this book was for my final history paper, I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. This book gave me plenty of insight on what 'shell-shock' was, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as I suffer from mental illnesses, and reading about different mental illnesses has always interested me.