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
He recalled a rather similar incident: He had taken a hand in a local
uprising in a distant quarter of the world. While he was escaping up
a mountain track, a rifle-shot from the enemy brought down his horse,
which rolled over and threw him violently against a boulder, where the
small of the back met the force of the impact. He felt intense pain and
lost consciousness. Upon recovery he found he was paralyzed. At the
end of several days, in a hiding-place in the rocks, he found himself
still unable to move his legs. The friend who had carried him to the
hiding-place refused to leave him. He thought of suicide, but then
discovered that he could move: at first, the big toes, then the ankles,
then the knees, and finally the hips. He was finally able to get into
the saddle.
Moreover, years before, he had heard that a man who broke his back was
paralyzed in the legs.
_Re_ autosuggestion, Babinski remarks that suggestion may work
in hystero-organic cases not precisely as in hysterical cases.
Autosuggestion may here replace or accompany the ordinary
heterosuggestion. Some temporary disturbance--a slight pain, a
trivial injury, or a mere bruise--may start up a complex process of
autosuggestion in which it may be difficult to unravel the part played
by the patient’s own reflexes, his previous experience and beliefs (in
this case, the reminiscences of a similar accident), the solicitude of
his friends, and the medical examination itself. Babinski believes that
hysterical paraplegia or monoplegia never appears automatically under
the influence of emotion; never appears after the manner of sweating,
diarrhea, or blushing.
Shell explosion; struck in cave-in: Symptoms in right leg (antebellum
experience).
=Case 287.= (MYERS, March, 1916.)
A private, 26 years old, had 11 months’ service and one month’s service
in France. He arrived at a base hospital the day after his shock.
Concussion had caused the dug-out in which he was standing to collapse.
A beam struck him on the left side of the face, and pinned him to the
ground on his right side. A piece of iron fell on the left side of
his back, and his right leg was pinned by a cross beam on the back of
his thigh. He was dazed by the shock; was released and was able to
walk, but complained of a pain in the right groin and a giving-way
of the right knee. The medical officer arrived about an hour later.
A numbness, or state of no feeling, in the right thigh appeared, and
increased to the point of total analgesia to the level of the upper
margin of the patella save for a narrow strip in the mid-line on the
posterior aspect of the leg. The only area of complete anesthesia and
algesia was on the outside of the lower half of the leg.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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