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
Miracle cures are wrought through many pages. Mutism, deafness and
blindness, palsies, contractures, and tics disappear at times as if by
magic under various forms of suggestion. Ether or chloroform narcosis
drives out the malady at the moment when it reveals its true nature.
Verbal suggestion has many adjuvants and collaborators--electricity,
sometimes severely administered, lumbar puncture, injections of
stovaine into the cerebrospinal fluid, injections of saline solution,
colored lights, vibrations, active mechanotherapy, hydrotherapy, hot
air baths and blasts, massage, etc. Painful and punitive measures have
their place--one is inclined to think a less valuable place than is
given them by some of the recorders. In some instances the element of
suggestion, while doubtless present, is overshadowed by the material
methods employed. Persuasion and actual physical improvement are in
these cases highly important. Reëducation is not infrequently in
evidence. The patient in one way or another is taught how to do things
which he had lost the way of doing.
It is interesting to American neurologists to note how frequently
in the reports, especially of French observers, the “Weir Mitchell
treatment” was the method employed, including isolation, the faradic
current, massage, and Swedish movements, hydrotherapy, dietetic
measures, reëducative processes, and powerful suggestion variously
exhibited, especially through the mastery of the physician over
the patient. It is rather striking that few records of Freudian
psychoanalytic therapy are presented.
When all is said, however, counter-suggestion and persuasion, in
whatever guise made use of, were not always sufficient and this not
only in the clearly organic cases, but in those which are ranked under
the head of reflex nervous disorders. In these the long-continued use
of physical agencies was found necessary to supplement the purely
psychic procedures, these facts sometimes giving rise in the Paris
Society of Neurology and elsewhere to animated discussion as to the
real nature of the cases. The pithiatic features of the case at times
disappear, but leave behind much to be explained and more to be
accomplished. The cures wrought are not always permanent and in some
cases post-bellum experiences may be required to prove the real value
of the measures advocated. The reader must study well the detailed
records in order to arrive at just conclusions; nevertheless, the
tremendous efficacy of suggestion and persuasion stands out in many of
the recitals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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