Literature Failure to Identify Brain Injury Shows Ignorance
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I have long been frustrated by how pervasive the failure to identify brain injury can be. I owe my discovery of the World War I literature on Shell Shock to a good friend’s academic pursuit of such topic while at Yale. The below quotes are from a paper discussing the treatment of shell shock as an emotional/organic injury in the novel: Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West. Quoting from Kara Harton’s paper:
Shell Shock in Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier
Set in 1916 at the Baldry family estate outside London, Return of the Soldier is the fictional story of Chris Baldry, a veteran of The Great War, who is discharged from the military due to shell shock-induced amnesia. His only memories are expressed as flashbacks of his pre-war life.
The idea of shell shock is introduced in the novel before the main character actually appears. Kitty and Jenny are at Baldry Court, nostalgically reminiscing about the past, when Margaret arrives with news about Chris. She informs the women that Chris has experienced some sort of misfortune on the battlefield but is somewhat hesitant to reveal the details. When Kitty asks if he is wounded, Margaret responds with, “Yes . . . he’s wounded,” but soon corrects herself by explaining, “I don’t know how to put it, he’s not exactly wounded. A shell burst –.” “Concussion?” Kitty asks. Margaret clarifies that Chris has shell shock and is “not dangerously ill.” After her explanation, the women share an awkward silence; they are obviously uncomfortable, and it is clear that neither of them is certain of the implications of the news.
Just as the characters of Return of the Soldier are not quite sure how to classify this condition, most Europeans, including medical and psychological experts, were unsure of the exact cause and characteristics of shell shock. There was an extensive debate about whether the nature of the condition was physical or mental, and whether it could legitimately be classified as a “wound.” The inability to pinpoint Chris’s injury in the previous passage is an excellent illustration of this uncertainty. It is not a tangible injury, and no one can decide exactly how to refer to it. The women seem uncomfortable using the term “shell shock,” which shows their lack of familiarity and understanding of the condition.
In addition to providing an excellent illustration of the uncertainty with which people approached shell shock, Return of the Soldier also contains numerous examples of the way that this condition disrupted society during and after the War. After Chris’s return, Kitty wants their lives to return to normalcy because as members of the upper echelon of society, they both have important responsibilities and obligations to fulfill.
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Jay Winter, a notable World War One historian, calls shell shock “a code to describe the shock of the war to the ruling elite, whose sons and apprentices, being groomed for war, were slaughtered in France and Flanders.” (Winter 10) In this war, unlike other wars, the higher a man’s socioeconomic status, the greater his chances of becoming a casualty. This fact was very real to the social elites, and the phenomenon of shell shock provided “a symbol . . . of the effect of the war on both their own social formation and British society as a whole, which many of them took to be interchangeable.” (10) Officers were expected to be shielded from the danger of emotional breakdown by their superior competence and judgment, their position of responsibility, and the need to set an example for their inferiors. The awareness that officers were more likely to become casualties (both due to shell shock and more conventional injuries) was an uncomfortable reality for society.
© Kara S. Harton, 2007 For the full paper, click here.
As my inquiry moved from literature to medical research, I found some of the published works of the British physician, Charles S. Myers. Tragically, Dr. Myers was guilty of a failure to identify brain injury. Rather than becoming a pioneer in the field of brain injury, Myers’ skepticism that an injury to the brain could have occurred without obvious head trauma, left him with the legacy of “shell shock” instead. While Myers did an excellent job in documenting diagnostic information from which a brain injury diagnosis could have been made, he sarcastically dismissed these cluster of symptoms as “hysterical” (psychiatric) in nature.
As we continue our discussion of the historic failure to identify brain injury in comat, we will take a closer look at Myers’ 1915 seminal paper on “A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock” published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, on February 13, 1915.
Next: Lancet Case Study of Three World War I Soldiers with Shell Shock