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
It would seem that psychiatric examination, possibly with the aid of
psychological work, would have excluded Walter N. from the army.
Oniric delirium (Régis) in a somewhat feebleminded Esthonian.
=Case 50.= (SOUKHANOFF, November, 1915.)
An Esthonian, 21, a soldier in a reserve regiment, came to a
psychiatric section towards the close of 1914. He was negativistic,
mumbling, restless, fugacious; later more tranquil. One day he entered
the physician’s office, walking up and down, mute, looking at articles
and attempting to take them away.
February 21, 1915, he was evacuated to the Notre Dame Hospital for the
insane at Petrograd,--a tall, healthy, agitated-looking youth with a
rapid pulse. He explained in poor Russian how he was now among Germans
and feared that they were going to hurt him. At first in the hospital
he was seclusive and morose. March 9 he became excited, and tried
to break through the door. He was placed in the bath, agitated and
yelling. An Esthonian interpreter did not quiet him. The Germans were
going to make a martyr of him. After an hour of this he grew quieter,
and next day complained only of head weakness and malaise, was in good
humour, smiling, and reading an Esthonian paper, and well behaved in
church, though tired and pale.
He now got better, began to work and wrote letters. It seemed as if he
had waked up from a painful dream. He explained how he thought he had
been in captivity; that he was going to be hanged. He had thought that
the Germans could talk Russian. He had had hard work in his regiment,
as he did not understand Russian and had never before left his little
village in Livonia. His mental disorder had started in the autumn,
but all that was now like a dream. He said that he had had a mental
disorder of short duration following some bodily disease, at the age of
thirteen. According to Soukhanoff, this is a case of Meynert’s amentia,
in a somewhat feebleminded person. The twilight state might well
receive (according to Soukhanoff) the term “oniric delirium” invented
by Régis.
Shell-shock; burial: Incapacity to rationalize the situation.
=Case 51.= (DUPRAT, October, 1917.)
A soldier, 39, a herdsman, was shell-shocked at Hill 304 May 23, 1916,
buried twice, slightly wounded in right eye, and carried unconscious
to Bar-le-Duc. He was then forty days in a semi-confusional state with
headaches and dreams of the Boches wanting to behead him. Some of these
dreams came in the waking state, in which state he could recognize them
as imaginary. In April, 1917, he said he had always been afraid, even
in daytime, that he would be hurt and had been especially troubled by
the fear of shells. He was also bothered by nocturnal enuresis which
might become an incurable disease and bring impairment of memory and
attention. Although not feebleminded the man was of but moderate
intelligence, and his emotions, according to Duprat, were such as to
defeat any complete resolution of his plight by the intellect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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