Causes of shell shock? Shell shock prevalence since WWI?
Alan Allport
news:d4162c1a.03071...@posting.google.com...
> I've read that some WWI physicians believed shell shock was caused by
> the vacuum created by an exploding artillery piece. According to that
> theory, at the very moment that a shell explodes, a powerful vacuum is
> formed around the area of the exploding shell, and anyone within the
> vacuum range of the explosion would be susceptible to having his
> cerebro-spinal fluid shaken and stirred like a cocktail, thus causing
> the physiological symptoms that were the hallmark of shell-shock
> (confusion, blank stares, wide-open eyes, drooling, etc), and which
> too often were incorrectly blamed on a soldier's "cowardice" or "lack
> of composure".
>
> That's the theory I've read, but has it been proven?
That was the theory at the beginning of the war, but (at least in the
British case) it was more and more discredited after the Battle of the Somme
when it became obvious that many soldiers who had not been exposed to a
close-range explosion were nonetheless demonstrating symptoms of
'shell-shock'. Gradually, through the influence of doctors like W.H.R.
Rivers, it became clearer that the condition was not a physiological
complaint with a simple cause and effect, but a complex psychiatric illness
produced by exhaustion and the cumulative experience of highly traumatic
events. To complicate matters, however, many psychiatrists thought that
officers and other ranks reacted to the condition differently (working class
brains being coarser instruments, naturally ...)
Alan.
William Black
"shnaggletooth" <shnagg...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:d4162c1a.03071...@posting.google.com...
> I've read that some WWI physicians believed shell shock was caused by
> the vacuum created by an exploding artillery piece. According to that
> theory, at the very moment that a shell explodes, a powerful vacuum is
> formed around the area of the exploding shell, and anyone within the
> vacuum range of the explosion would be susceptible to having his
> cerebro-spinal fluid shaken and stirred like a cocktail, thus causing
> the physiological symptoms that were the hallmark of shell-shock
> (confusion, blank stares, wide-open eyes, drooling, etc), and which
> too often were incorrectly blamed on a soldier's "cowardice" or "lack
> of composure".
>
> That's the theory I've read, but has it been proven?
It hasn't been.
What happened was (as I understand it) that British doctors in base
hospitals realised that FS2 (flying sickness number 2) that aircrew were
suffering from was the same as shell shock and so realised that it couldn't
be caught by hanging around shell bursts....
Flying sickness number one was motion sickness...
--
William Black
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