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
_Re_ alcoholism and disciplinary cases, we find alcoholism bulking
large in Lépine’s account of military delinquency. Fugue subjects are
not infrequently alcoholic. Minor disobedience is also often alcoholic.
Acts of violence are characteristically alcoholic, or executed by
subjects with hereditary alcoholic taint. (Such acts were in France
especially common before the anti-absinthe law in 1915.) Alcoholic
episodes and impulses often culminate in arson. No doubt, espionage
employs alcoholism for a portion of its technique, though delusional
mystics and subnormal hypersuggestibles are more often the purveyors
of information to the enemy. The theft list, also, shows its share of
alcoholics. Alcoholics are less common amongst those who, contrary
to rules, assume shoulder-straps or other decorations. Here the
sub-normals and victims of imbalance, as well as the drug cases, are
more likely to figure if the matter is psychiatric at all.
Remarks upon an atrocity.
=Case 94.= (KASTAN, January, 1916.)
April 15, 1915, a German soldier went with three comrades to a farm, to
select a sheep for slaughter; they were obliged to go to three farms.
The man carried a revolver and cartridges in his pocket. He threatened
the farmer that he met with this revolver, and desired to rape the
farmer’s daughter. He was very drunk, and said to the non-commissioned
officer who was called in at the time, “You have served only a year
longer than I have.” He staggered, struck violently with his hand at
the sergeant, and gave insolent replies.
He had already choked the peasant’s daughter, scratched her face, and
bitten her fingers, hand and arm. She could not run away as she was
lame. The soldier held the revolver to her face and shot it off several
times, offered sex assault, scratched her feet with his spurs, and
tried to twist her neck. The non-commissioned officer threatened to
shoot him, and he then became still. He said to the first-lieutenant
before whom he was taken, that he would do anything but allow himself
to be beaten, and at this moment moved his arms about in the air, and
bloody foam came from his mouth. The first-lieutenant previously had
always thought him to be normal except for a strange flicker and unrest
of the eyes. There was a history that he had already once attacked a
servant girl. The man had amnesia for the affair, only remembering how
the non-commissioned officer had come on a white horse. He remembered
nothing about the peasant and the girl. He said that he had been given
to earache on the right side in winter. There was a history of his
having fallen from a tree in childhood, becoming unconscious. He had
been a sufficiently good scholar up to the second class in school. He
had been an excellent soldier.
Alcoholism: Atrocity.
=Case 95.= (KASTAN, January, 1916.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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