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
A soldier lost all memory of his hospital stay in Salonica and the
voyage home. He could only remember a little about the hospital at
Bandol. There is a period of transition to full memory in malarial
cases characterized by sure memory, vague on certain points,
alternating with phases of almost complete amnesia. The soldier
in question had very inexact memories of the Bandol Hospital, and
could only remember about his fevers, that they began about noon and
terminated about four o’clock. Twice he had been found in his shirt,
walking, unconscious, in the passageway of the hospital. Having
obtained leave for convalescence, three months after his memory gap
began, he went to Paris, and probably had attacks at home. He vaguely
remembered afterward being carried by automobile to the Pasteur
Hospital, December 1. There he remained to the end of March, 1917,
without preserving anything but the vaguest memories of an intermediary
period of more than six months. The memory in these malarial cases
often remains permanently altered and there may even be a retrograde
amnesia, carrying back to facts prior to the gap and an anterograde
amnesia relative to facts after the main gap.
Thus, there is in the febrile period a retrograde amnesia and in the
post-febrile period a retrograde or anterograde amnesia. One group of
subjects are severe cerebral cases, and the memory gap appears to run
back to a period of true mental confusion. But there is another group
of patients who preserve throughout the febrile period an absolute
consciousness of all acts, and yet the memory gap is just as sharp and
definite as in the confusional cases.
Malaria: Korsakow syndrome.
=Case 130.= (CARLILL, April, 1917.)
A stoker, 45, was admitted to the Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar,
November 6, 1916, from the Fifteenth General Hospital in Alexandria, to
which he had come from a hospital in Bombay about three weeks before.
At Alexandria he was anemic and showed an edema of legs which had been
present for six weeks. Cylindruria; no albuminuria. At Haslar there was
no cylindruria and no edema, and nothing but weakness, gouty arthritis
of left wrist, right ear and left great toe. Red cells 4,650,000,
leucocytes 10,000 (52 per cent polymorphonuclear, 46 per cent
lymphocytes). He was rather dull mentally. December 10th, Dr. Fildes
found malarial organisms in the blood on the occasion of a hyperpyrexia
(104°). Quinine was given. December 14th, he was transferred
neurological. According to the patient’s own story, he was born June
10, 1868, lived in Fulham, had a daughter aged 12 years, had recently
seen his wife at the hospital: all this seemed plausible enough.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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