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
It seems that several days after transfer he had had an attack of
delirium in the night, having lost consciousness, and tried continually
to get up out of bed, saying that he wanted to go to Verdun to fight.
This spell lasted several hours and on the days following came mutism,
refusal of food, and a state of stupor. Nutritive enemata were given.
As he grew better he sometimes ate a great deal, sometimes nothing,
even wanted poison from his family, and wrote to a comrade that he
wanted to commit suicide.
May 9, he was clearer, told of seeing the shell, which he said he had
not heard, nor did he know how he had gotten to a hospital. His head
and spine had hurt him ever since the shock. He had had difficulty
in urination for two days after the shock. He could not remember
the delirious attack in the country hospital. He gave various data
about his life, but not fully. He refused to lie on the left side,
or to walk, because of pain. He could lift either leg from the
bed, but hardly both. There was an irregular coarse tremor of the
extremities. The right hand was weaker than the left; there were no
reflex disorders; no change in the eye grounds. There was a patchy
analgesia. May 26, stupor reappeared as before, with semimutism. June,
the patient presented the appearance of a dementia praecox in stupor,
with stereotyped gestures and attitudes, without catatonia. The patient
was sent to a hospital for the insane at Cadillac. November 9, 1916, he
returned to the neurological center, as mental and cerebral disorder
had disappeared. There still persisted a difficulty in remembering
facts since the shock and there was still a functional paresis of the
legs.
We here deal with a case of a meningitic syndrome following shell-shock
and lasting fourteen months.
Brain abscess in a syphilitic: Matutinal loss of knee-jerks.
=Case 110.= (DUMOLARD, REBIERRE, QUELLIEN, 1916.)
An unmarried subaltern officer, 30, entered an army neuropsychiatric
center, April 8, 1915, looking exhausted and bearing a ticket “nervous
asthenia, evacuated for neurological examination.” He said he had had
scarlet fever at ten; strongly denied syphilis, of which he presented
no trace; had not been excessively alcoholic and had had no nervous
seizures. Detailed information showed that he had been a normal child.
He left his two years’ military service with promotion and was a man of
above the ordinary intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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