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
All neurologists know the difficulties in diagnosticating epilepsy
in the absence of opportunities to see attacks and to receive the
carefully analyzed statement of the observers of the patient. All this
and much more is well brought out in the chapter on the epileptoses.
Many epileptics found their way into the armies either through the
carelessness of examiners or by suppression of the facts on the part of
those who desired to serve.
The fact that an imbecile can shoot straight and face fire comes out in
one or two places, but this does not seem to prove that a good rifleman
is necessarily an all-round good soldier.
A book like Dr. Southard’s could be made of much use in teaching
students, especially postgraduates, by having them, when a particular
subject like epilepsy or schizophrenia, for instance, is under
discussion, use as collateral reading the case reports of this work.
Dr. Southard’s book will prove useful to many workers--to the medical
officer whose duty it is to examine recruits for the service or to pass
upon and treat them while in service; almost equally to the medical
officer in time of peace; to authors of textbooks and treatises and to
contributors to neurological and psychiatric journals; to lecturers and
clinical demonstrators; to the examiner for the juvenile courts; and to
members of the psychopathic, psychiatric, and neurological staffs of
our hospitals.
One is not called upon in an introduction to review at length the
contents of the volume, but it may prove of value to the reader to dip
here and there into the pages of the work to which his attention is
being invited.
It will be remembered that fifty years ago and much later, down to
the time of Babinski’s active propaganda in favor of the theories of
suggestion, counter-suggestion, and persuasion in hysteria, various
affections of a vasomotor and thermic type were included in the list
of hysterical phenomena. These and some other phenomena sometimes
classed as hysterical, Babinski and those who accord with him now find
it necessary to sweep entirely from the domain of hysteria, which being
produced by suggestion and cured by counter-suggestion or persuasion
cannot include symptoms which are beyond the control of the will and
intellect of the patient.
According to the new or rather revived pronouncement, these must be due
either to definite organic lesion, or to a disorder of reflex origin,
connoting the occurrence of changes in the nervous centers as long
ago taught by Vulpian and Charcot. In the records of cases and in the
discussions thereon this differentiation receives much consideration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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