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
We here deal with a cerebellar syndrome plus a hemianesthesia.
Mine explosion: Tremors, mutism, hemiplegia. Tremors cleared by
hypnosis. Mutism replaced by stuttering. Persistent hemiplegia,
probably organic.
=Case 219.= (SMYLY, April, 1917.)
A soldier was blown up by a mine and rendered unconscious. Upon
recovery of consciousness, the patient was dumb, unable to work, very
nervous, paralyzed as to left arm and leg. The paralysis improved so
that in the hospital at home the patient became able to get about.
However, he threw his legs about in an unusual fashion. Several months
later the patient was much improved.
Shortly, there was a relapse. Transferred to a hospital for chronic
cases, the patient was unable to walk without assistance on account of
complete paralysis of the leg. There was insomnia, a general tremor,
bad stuttering, and a habit of starting in terror at the slightest
noise.
Hypnotic treatment was followed by almost complete disappearance
of the tremor. The patient began to sleep six or seven hours a
night; nervousness diminished, and the stuttering slowly improved;
but neither the paralysis nor the anesthesia of the left leg was
affected by suggestion. The leg remained cold, livid, anesthetic, and
flaccidly paralyzed to the hip. A slight improvement has followed upon
faradization but the patient still can walk only with assistance.
Smyly regards this case as probably not a true case of Shell-shock,
depending as he states “more on a lesion in the nervous system than in
the psyche.”
Shrapnel bullet WOUND of skull: Unconsciousness (three weeks), followed
by agraphia (three weeks), insomnia (six weeks), amnesia (six to
eight weeks), hemiplegia (twelve weeks), impairment of vision (twelve
to sixteen weeks), dreams (seven months). Recovery save for slight
overfatiguability.
=Case 220.= (BINSWANGER, October, 1917.)
A French tailor, aged 22, of healthy stock, was wounded in the left
frontal bone in August, 1914. The shrapnel bullet, from an unknown
distance, made a penetrative wound. The man was able to remember
how at the moment he was injured he felt a sort of strain in his
brain, felt his head with his hand, found he was bleeding, took out a
bandage from his kit, removed it from its cover and without unfolding
it put it on his head. At this moment he fell unconscious and there
was then complete loss of memory for three weeks. This patient, who
was intellectually keen, distinguished exactly between what he could
himself remember and what he was told by his comrades. One of these had
told him that he had cried out indistinctly that in a matter of fifteen
days he would be well. He estimated the interval between his wound and
the loss of consciousness as about five minutes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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