Shell-shock and other neuropsychiatric problems : $b Presented in five hundred and eighty-nine case histories from the war literature, 1914-1918Southard, Elmer Ernest
History
Shell-shock and other neuropsychiatric problems : $b Presented in five hundred and eighty-nine case histories from the war literature, 1914-1918
Southard, Elmer Ernest
War neuroses; World War, 1914-1918 -- Medical care; World War, 1914-1918 -- Psychological aspects
This incident seems to have made a powerful impression upon the
sapper. A fortnight later, while working in the trenches, he had more
epigastric sensations with vague discomfort. He thought about the
earlier crisis and about his wounded comrades, and again fell down
and had more convulsions lasting a quarter of an hour. The tongue may
have been slightly bitten in this seizure. In the genesis of this
second seizure we may consider that the feeling of discomfort and the
epigastric sensations served to recall the first seizure, so that
the second one may be regarded as due to autosuggestion--that is, as
hysterical.
A little later, on a hot day in the trench, while working, the sapper
turned to a comrade and saw a great black spot on his face. He turned
toward another and saw another great black spot on this face also.
He was frightened, felt strange sensations, fell, and had a third
convulsive crisis. The black spots that he saw were due to a scotoma,
the result of a transient glance at the sun.
After this scotomatous episode, his crises always had a visual aura.
He would feel rather uncomfortable, leave the supper table, feel a
gastric sensation, warmth in the face, and oppression. He would go out
in the cold for the air, look about for something, appear frightened,
fix his gaze upon a certain point, and cease to reply to questions. His
head would jerk back suddenly, and he would utter strangled cries of
fear. He was now evidently prey to a terrifying hallucination. In ten
minutes, everything had gone again, leaving him trembling with emotion.
He would then relate how, after the epigastric sensation had begun,
he tried to see if he could make out something abnormal; whereupon a
little fiery wheel would appear and roll up nearer and nearer, so as to
almost touch his eyelids. He could see his comrades to the right and to
the left of the wheel; he could hear questions but could not answer.
Just as the fire wheel was about to blast him, consciousness was lost
and the fits came on.
War strain; anxiety; confusion; fugue. Demotion and detail to the
interior.
=Case 75.= (BARAT, November, 1914.)
A lieutenant, 25, an officer in a regiment on active duty near the
front, was called before a special board charged with desertion in
the face of the enemy. He had been assigned to a certain position but
not only had not complied with the order, but had wandered off to the
British sector and been arrested there as a spy.
The prisoner was well developed, without stigmata; heredity, negative.
His career in the army had been courageous and he had been advanced
several ranks and was about to be given a medal for bravery. He said
that he had been under a severe strain for several days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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