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
After the first hypnotic treatment the patient was able to stand and
take a number of steps, and the tremor gradually diminished. After two
treatments standing became normal and walking was much improved, the
tremor ceased, cyanosis and hyperidrosis disappeared, and the movements
of the bowels and urination became normal. Thereafter the patient had
no attention paid to him deliberately and in a week’s time became well.
Here is a case in which, as Nonne states, the somatic trauma required
by Oppenheim as the basis of every traumatic neurosis did not occur.
Moreover, the sudden cures by hypnotism, or by any other method in
these cases, warrant us in supposing that there are no such fine
molecular changes as Oppenheim and von Sarbo assert. Such experience
as the cures in this group of cases confirms, according to Nonne,
the surprising result first achieved in this war (Bonhoeffer, Wagner
von Jauregg, Karplus, Wollenberg, Westphal) that the most severe
neuroses produced by somatic and psychic traumata can be cured in an
astoundingly rapid manner without residuals.
_Re_ the controversy over Oppenheim’s traumatic neurosis, Nonne holds
with the Charcot school that traumatic neurosis is clinically identical
with hysteria. Oppenheim admits the part played by psychogenesis,
but has always laid a greater emphasis upon the actual injury of
the neuronic apparatus in which he believes. He thinks that small
hemorrhages, inflammatory processes, and degenerative processes affect
the neurones unfavorably, and permit the psychogenic effects to occur
more readily. Of course the insurance-company attitude and the attitude
of railway corporations saw malingering in all cases, and to this day,
neurologists are inclined to see a great deal of “indemnity neurosis”
in these cases. Opposed to the corporation men and the neurologists
were the psychiatrists, who chiefly upheld an emotional theory of
genesis--whence we began to hear of the neuroses of fright and of
accident.
Oppenheim claims to have established with war cases the fact that
an entirely normal person without heredity and without antebellum
acquired soil, may develop a neurosis through war stress. Oppenheim
concedes that there may be purely psychic cases, but holds that there
are nevertheless, numerous purely physical cases and a great number
of cases of a compound nature, which are both physical and psychical
in their etiology. Oppenheim’s point is not that every single symptom
described _may_ not be upon occasion psychogenic, but that the data
of this war prove that neuronic injury, particularly injury of the
peripheral neurones, can also produce these effects. Nonne, Forster,
Lewandowsky, and others, opposed Oppenheim’s views vehemently. See
especially comments by Zeehandelaar.
Shell-shock; BURIAL HEAD DOWN: Brachial monoplegia, head-shaking,
speech disorder, corneal and conjunctival reflexes absent.
Determination of hysterical phenomena to parts buried.
=Case 249.= (ARINSTEIN, 1916.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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