What was the experience of shell shock

When he first came under Hurst's care, he'd regressed into a babylike state and was sitting in a wheelchair. Gradually Meek recovered the physical functions he'd lost, and returned to normality under Hurst's tutelage.

Another of Hurst's techniques was to take the men to the peace and quiet of the rolling Devon countryside. It was thought to be a place where the men could get over their hysteria through labouring on the land. The men toiled on the farm, and were encouraged to use their creative energies.

He also directed a reconstruction of the battlefields of Flanders on Dartmoor to help the men relive their experiences. Back indoors, the men were encouraged to write and to produce a magazine with a gossip column called Ward Whispers. Arthur Hurst's son Christopher recalls his father's treatments, "The main work was occupational therapy.

These soldiers, who had been shell shocked, had lost vital faculties, like walking, speaking and so on, were given jobs to do here. My father He cured these cases by means of persuasion and hypnotism. Hurst's pioneering methods were both humane and sympathetic. It was a miracle that literally saved the lives of dozens of shattered men.

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World War I: Years Later. In September , at the very outset of the great war, a dreadful rumor arose. It was said that at the Battle of the Marne, east of Paris, soldiers on the front line had been discovered standing at their posts in all the dutiful military postures—but not alive.

That such an outlandish story could gain credence was not surprising: notwithstanding the massive cannon fire of previous ages, and even automatic weaponry unveiled in the American Civil War, nothing like this thunderous new artillery firepower had been seen before. A battery of mobile 75mm field guns, the pride of the French Army, could, for example, sweep ten acres of terrain, yards deep, in less than 50 seconds; , shells had been fired in a five-day period of the September engagement on the Marne.

The rumor emanating from there reflected the instinctive dread aroused by such monstrous innovation. Shrapnel from mortars, grenades and, above all, artillery projectile bombs, or shells, would account for an estimated 60 percent of the 9. And, eerily mirroring the mythic premonition of the Marne, it was soon observed that many soldiers arriving at the casualty clearing stations who had been exposed to exploding shells, although clearly damaged, bore no visible wounds.

Rather, they appeared to be suffering from a remarkable state of shock caused by blast force. In a landmark article, Capt. Organic injury from blast force? Or neurasthenia, a psychiatric disorder inflicted by the terrors of modern warfare? Yet it was a nervous age, the early 20th century, for the still-recent assault of industrial technology upon age-old sensibilities had given rise to a variety of nervous afflictions.

As the war dragged on, medical opinion increasingly came to reflect recent advances in psychiatry, and the majority of shell shock cases were perceived as emotional collapse in the face of the unprecedented and hardly imaginable horrors of trench warfare. There was a convenient practical outcome to this assessment; if the disorder was nervous and not physical, the shellshocked soldier did not warrant a wound stripe, and if unwounded, could be returned to the front.

Then when it seemed right on top of us, it did, with a shattering crash that made the earth tremble. It was terrible. The concussion felt like a blow in the face, the stomach and all over; it was like being struck unexpectedly by a huge wave in the ocean.

Transferred to a treatment center in Britain or France, the invalided soldier was placed under the care of neurology specialists and recuperated until discharged or returned to the front. Officers might enjoy a final period of convalescence before being disgorged back into the maw of the war or the working world, gaining strength at some smaller, often privately funded treatment center—some quiet, remote place such as Lennel House, in Coldstream, in the Scottish Borders country.

The Lennel Auxiliary Hospital, a private convalescent home for officers, was a country estate owned by Maj. Walter and Lady Clementine Waring that had been transformed, as had many private homes throughout Britain, into a treatment center. The estate included the country house, several farms, and woodlands; before the war, Lennel was celebrated for having the finest Italianate gardens in Britain.

Lennel House is of interest today, however, not for its gardens, but because it preserved a small cache of medical case notes pertaining to shell shock from the First World War. Similarly, 80 percent of U. What is PTSD? What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder? Sheth et al. Marc-Antoine Crocq and Louis Crocq Timeline: Mental illness and war through history; Minnesota Public Radio.

Anderson, David The Shock of War; Smithsonian. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. By the time the American Civil War broke out in , both ether and chloroform had been in use for several years as methods of surgical anesthesia. Though both anesthetic agents were developed around the same time the s , chloroform soon emerged as the more widely used, as The film draws on the story of an actual soldier named Fritz Niland and a U.

War Department directive Food, gas and clothing were rationed. Communities conducted scrap Her experiences as a nurse during the Crimean War were foundational in her views about sanitation.

Beyond their goal of crushing Italian Axis forces, the Allies wanted to draw German troops away from Dorothea Lynde Dix was an author, teacher and reformer. Charged during the Clara Barton is one of the most-recognized heroes of the American Civil War.

She began her illustrious career as an educator but found her true calling tending wounded soldiers on and off bloody Civil War battlefields. When the war ended, Barton worked to identify missing and Few medical doctors have been as lauded—and loathed—as James Marion Sims.