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 Colonial soldier was sent back from the front, September 12, 1914,
for nervous disorder due to the shock of the windage of a bullet.
He had not lost consciousness. Under observation at his station, he
got typhoid fever, and was cared for at Paris from the beginning of
October. About October 15 he began to feel pains in his left shoulder,
neck, and arm. The diagnosis, neuritis, was made and was strongly borne
in upon the patient, so that upon the cure of his typhoid, he went out
on two months’ leave with a complete impotence and much pain of the
left arm. At the end of his relief, he was evacuated to Villejuif.
January 24, it was found that he had no somatic phenomena whatever,
despite the fact that the left arm and a part of the forearm was
powerless, and so painful that the patient cried out when his arm was
moved. There were a few cracklings in the scapulo-humeral joint.
Hot air and reëducation cured the man in less than two months (March
20), though the disorder had lasted for four months. The patient had
been retired for hysteria before the war and had re-enlisted.
Bullet wound of pleura: Reflex hemiplegia and double ulnar syndrome.
=Case 136.= (PHOCAS AND GUTMANN, May, 1915.)
A soldier, 26, was wounded in the enfilading of an Argonne trench
December 17, 1914. He felt the bullet like an electrical shock, and
fell. He had been leaning forward at the time and suddenly felt the
left half of his body go paralyzed and his mouth pulled to one side.
He did not lose consciousness, and spat up a good deal of blood five
minutes after falling. He lay in the trench all night, unable to move
his left leg except by the aid of his right. He was evacuated next
day. There was a five-franc piece wound at the upper border of the
left scapula, four finger-breadths from the median line. There were a
few lung signs which rapidly cleared up. December 28, the hemiplegia
was better, although neurological examination showed weakness of left
upper extremity, abolition of deep reflexes, and certain skin changes
of the left hand with edema (_main succulent_), decreased resistance of
muscles of lower extremity to passive motion, especially of adductors
and flexors, exaggerated polykinetic left knee-jerk, ankle clonus,
Babinski reflex, abdominal and cremasteric reflexes absent on left,
platysma paralysis left, with complete paralysis in the inferior
distribution of the facialis; whistling impossible. Also the left eye
could not be closed singly. Synergic movements of the lower part of the
paralyzed face when the right hand of the patient was grasped.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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