Shell Shock and Military Psychiatry in World War I

1914–1918 CE

Industrial warfare produced large numbers of soldiers suffering mutism, paralysis, nightmares, memory loss, tremors and other symptoms grouped under the term shell shock. Medical opinion remained divided over whether these conditions arose from physical injury, psychological trauma, inherited weakness or failures of discipline.

Doctors such as W. H. R. Rivers used conversation, memory and therapeutic relationships to help officers understand their symptoms. Other practitioners, including Lewis Yealland, used command, punishment and electrical stimulation to force a rapid restoration of military function.

This context supports fiction about trauma, military hospitals, medical ethics and the contradiction inherent in treating damaged soldiers so that they could be returned to combat.

Related people for Shell Shock and Military Psychiatry in World War I

Alice Wheeldon1866–1919 Arthur John Brock1879–1947 Arthur Maurice Hocart1883–1939 Bertrand Russell1872–1970 David Lloyd George1863 – 1922 Maud Allan1873–1956 Noel Pemberton Billing1881–1948 Robert Graves1895–1985 Siegfried Sassoon1886–1967 Wilfred Owen1893–1918 William Halse Rivers Rivers1864–1922

Series

Series about Shell Shock and Military Psychiatry in World War I (1 series)

Regeneration Trilogy in Order

by Pat Barker 3 books 4.0

The Regeneration Trilogy follows soldiers, doctors, poets and civilians during the final two years of the First World War. Its central relationship is between the neurologist and army psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, while Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and…