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
the war, regarded them as of little consequence, entered the service,
and developed epilepsy.
Responsibility of a drunken epileptic.
=Case 58.= (JUQUELIER, March, 1917.)
The question of responsibility arose in the case of a soldier who left
his camp the morning of October 23, 1916, and went to a neighboring
place, where he drank, with four others, two quarts of wine. At about
three o’clock in the afternoon, his captain met him on the street,
lost, and looking drunk. He told him that he would send him to the
trenches in the evening. The man lay down and went to sleep. At about
six o’clock, it was found that he could not put on his equipment alone,
and in fact threatened the other men with his bayonet, and then went
to sleep. He woke up and explained that he had had one of his nervous
crises. He remembered the matter of the bayonet but had forgotten
everything else about the struggle.
This soldier was 29 years old, the son of an alcoholic, and the ninth
child of a mother who died shortly after her tenth pregnancy. He had
had measles and bronchitis as a child, and in childhood had had bad
dreams; at the age of ten he had swooning spells. He became a quarryman
and a habitual drinker, subject to dyspepsia, nightmares, and nocturnal
cramps. There had never been any crises, however, up to wartime.
January, 1916, when a shell burst near him, the first sharply-defined
epileptoid crisis came, and was followed by a number of others,
either on leave or on service, March 8, June 2, and July 13. These
attacks showed a sudden fall without warning, loss of consciousness,
convulsions, tongue biting, incontinence of urine, a period of more or
less coördinate agitation at the time consciousness was reappearing,
sometimes a fugue, and often amnesia for the whole. He had a scar on
the left border of the tongue.
Should this epilepsy be regarded as entailing irresponsibility? He
left camp before the crisis, accordingly in a period when he was in
full possession of consciousness and will, and he had gotten into
an irregular situation by drunkenness before his epileptic crisis
started in. His struggle with his comrades, however, appears to be
a portion of a post-critical dazed state. The medicolegal decision,
therefore, was that he was guilty of leaving his command but not of
the other misdemeanor. Considering the general nature of epilepsy, the
responsibility of this man for the whole adventure is rather slight.
The Council, however, condemned the man to five years of labor, without
admitting that the crisis following so soon the actual misdemeanor
should argue a diminution of responsibility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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