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
Logre classifies as a melancholic fugue the adventures of a man who had
been depressed for some days, had stopped talking and eating, and ran
away suddenly in the middle of an attack of anxious agitation. He was
very anxious over the health of his daughter, whom he thought to be
severely ill. It was, in fact, to go to Paimpol that he deserted, but
he deserted with his arms and without any money. He went off on foot
“in the Brittany direction.” He had gone 50 kilometers, the next day,
and was picked up near Chateau-Thierry by two gendarmes, who fell upon
him, seeing his regalia, and cried, “Give yourself up!” He replied in
a firm voice, “No, I shall not give myself up!” and seizing his gun he
made at one of the gendarmes. There was a fight. The gendarme declared
in his report that he judged it opportune to retreat behind a tree. The
soldier, knowing his trench lore very well, barricaded himself behind
a pile of beets. There he would have held the gendarmes in check for
some time if another had not succeeded by a détour through some woods,
in catching him. He gave himself up after firing several ineffective
shots, but not without getting a bullet in his left thigh himself.
With the charge of desertion and attempt to murder, he was handed
over for mental examination. He was, in fact, a melancholic patient,
subject to attacks of anxiety, and requiring long observation at a
neuropsychiatric center for diagnosis.
Chavigny observed numerous victims of melancholia characterized by
war terror. He remarks a somewhat curious fact that, whereas the
melancholics were numerous and their mental states related to the
war, on the other hand, the paretics were rather apt to be maniacal
than melancholic. Soukhanoff, however, remarks on the occurrence of
depression in a great number of types of psychosis, as was found
in the Russo-Japanese war. Soukhanoff found frequent instances of
schizophrenia, wherein the melancholia tends to conceal the actual
dementia praecox. Soukhanoff predicted that depression will figure
largely in the war.
Apples in No-Man’s-Land.
=Case 165.= (WEYGANDT, 1915.)
A soldier in November, 1914, suddenly climbed out of the trench and
began to pick apples from an apple-tree between the firing lines. The
idea was to get a bag of apples for his comrades, but he began to pelt
the French trenches with apples. He was called back and on account of
his strange conduct sent to hospital. Here he was at times given to
pressure of speech and restlessness; he would climb the posts of the
sleeping room and then loudly declare he wanted to get back to the
trenches; he did not want to go back to Germany alive; did not want to
live over to-morrow; was guilty of a sin; had a spot of sin, _Schand_,
on his heart. Sometimes he refused food and said anything else tasted
better. It seemed he had formerly talked about the Iron Cross.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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