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
The patient asserted that everyone considered him a spy. Voices
continually told him: “You are a spy.” “What? Spy? Caught? What?” “You
will be shot by the Germans for espionage.” About three months before
his present trouble, the patient had been wounded in left shoulder by a
fragment of a large projectile. The wound healed and examination showed
a big scar with attachments to the bone. The patient asserted that now
he could not touch anything with his left hand, as there immediately go
from it “some currents” to the Germans in the trenches and they at once
begin shooting at the Russian position. Later, the patient could not
even look in the direction of the German front, for all he had to do
was to throw a glance in that direction and the Germans would at once
begin a bombardment.
All these phenomena he explained as being due to the fact that the
fragments of the large projectile which entered his shoulder were
poisoned and charmed. Through these fragments there went currents from
his hands to the Germans. The patient always supported his left hand
with his right, in order not to touch anything with it. He slept only
on his right side, so as not to touch the bed or floor with his left
hand. During the examination and conversation the patient tried always
to look downwards, so as not to throw a chance look in the direction of
the German front and call out their fire.
An Iron Cross winner had a hysterical-looking attack (reminiscence of
a bayoneted Gurkha). Later he begins to talk of “this damned war that
is so vulgar” and of “atrocities, concrete and abstract”: Shortly the
diagnosis, hebephrenia, had to be made.
=Case 158.= (BONHOEFFER, 1915.)
An Iron Cross winner, 21, in the field from August, 1914, to the middle
of March, 1915, at first in France, later in Russia, finally went to
hospital for rheumatism and sciatica. Three months later he had to be
transferred to the Charité in a state of delirious excitement.
The attack began suddenly. He thought he was in the field telephoning
with his captain, trembled, threatened to injure people about him,
said he could not hold the position with the few men he had, and
the like. Next day he quieted down and became oriented for time and
place. He explained that he had seen a Gurkha coming upon him with a
mallet, by way of revenge upon him because he had stuck his bayonet in
the Gurkha’s breast. Behind a little hill he had seen Frenchmen and
Englishmen, from which he drew the conclusion there was going to be an
attack that night. A little cloud of dust he thought was enemy cavalry.
In point of fact, he said he had once on patrol stuck a Gurkha through
and the Gurkha’s eyes had since followed him in his mind. He had seen
him crawling along the ground one evening and heard his step. The
patient had imperfect insight into these hallucinations when questioned
about them during the daytime, and still talked somewhat as if the
experience was a real one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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