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 soldier was picked up insensible in the public street and brought
to hospital by ambulance, unconscious, breathing stertorously, pupils
dilated, lips parched, unresponsive to stimuli, but without signs of
injury or alcoholism.
The pulse grew slower, the respirations more sighing, the heart-beat
more diffused and labored; but towards evening, about eight hours
after admission, he began to move the eyelids and lips, and muttered a
response to the request for his name. After ten more hours, respiration
grew better, and Croton oil led to a movement of the bowels. Natural
sleep intervened, and 18 hours after the onset of unconsciousness, the
man woke up, and in the course of a few days became fairly well though
still dazed and confused.
This soldier had never received any definite injury in his war service,
but McWalter attributes his break-down to the effects of the constant
shocks from the bursting of shells, and the scattering of shrapnel.
McWalter generalizes that a soldier, in the course of some civil
occupation _after_ the war, might develop symptoms, even fatal
symptoms, and still the death in the case would be a direct consequence
of the war.
Shell-shock symptoms, some initial, with recovery--others late and
gradual, with deterioration.
=Case 283.= (SMYLY, April, 1917.)
A soldier became blind, deaf and dumb, as well as paralyzed, as a
result of shell explosion. When he arrived at the hospital, he was
able to see but had visual hallucinations. In a few days he recovered
his hearing. There was a fine tremor of the hands, controllable by
suggestion. There was an almost complete amnesia, but the patient
remained able to read and write.
The pain persisted several months. The patient was physically well
and seemed perfectly intelligent despite his aphasia and amnesia.
One night, he sprang out of bed, shouting, “The guns are coming over
us!” and from that time forward was able to speak. Amnesia, however,
supervened for the months in the Dublin Hospital, and the patient
believed that he was still in France. He also became unable to read or
write, and was unable to recognize any letters except those he had been
taught to speak during his period of dumbness. Still later he got a
flaccid paralysis of the legs. From seeming perfectly intelligent, he
began to seem markedly deteriorated. Hypnosis with waking suggestions
had no power upon him. After a time, intelligence reappeared, but there
had not been any recovery of locomotion at the time of report.
Wounds, gas, burial: Collapse on home leave.
=Case 284.= (E. SMITH, June, 1916.)
A non-commissioned officer went through the first eleven months of the
war in France and Flanders and was subjected to every kind of strain
therein. He was wounded twice, gassed twice, and buried under a house,
in each instance being treated in the field ambulance and returning to
the trenches. Some time thereafter he was granted five days’ leave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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