Shell Shock (was Newspaper interview request)

[Mark A Mandel]

I'm going to make my main point as reply to one of Jim's comments, which
I'm moving from its place in his message to the top of mine.

On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, James A. Landau wrote:

#Commentary: judging by the way Myers uses the phrase "shell shock", it seems
#to have been fairly well known to the Lancet readership, which is to say, to
#the British medical community, by February of 1915, at which point the
#British army had been in action for no more than six months.

I agree with this, but I do not see clear evidence that they used it for
any aspect of the medical conditions resulting from proximity to a shell
explosion. I think, rather, that it refers to the physical shock of the
shell explosion, the impact of the shock wave* on the victim.

* OED Online:
1907 Chem. Abstr. I. 1470 The explosive wave is a shock wave accompanied
by a decided combustion.

        ---- back to Jim's sequence ----

#In a message dated 3/25/2003 8:32:00 PM Eastern Standard Time,
#fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU writes:
#
#> OED's first use [of "shell shock"] is dated 11 Dec. 1915.  Here is a slight
#> antedating:
#>
#> 1915 _N.Y. Times_ 30 Oct. 2  Cases of loss of speech following shell shock
#> are being cured by the use of anaesthetics, according to a report in The
#> Lancet, made by Dr. A. P. Procter.

Reading this passage, I think the phrase is more likely to refer to the
physical impact of the shock wave from the exploding shell, as cause,
than to any medical consequences.  Its use without explanation may imply
that the phrase was already familiar, but it is also (and not
exclusively) consistent with an analytic interpretation, approximately
'the shock caused by a shell'.  While OED Online gives "shock" in
something like the modern medical sense dating clearly to 1889, probably
1867, and ambiguously 1804, I see in Fred's 1915 NYT cite no indication
that that's the sense intended.

Similarly below; comments follow cites.

#Lancet, volume 189 page 977, issue of October 30, 1915, "Three Cases of
        [...]
#The phrase appears exactly once in the article, in the opening paragraph:
#
#"Loss of the power to speak has been a very common sequence of shell-shock.
#A majority of the cases have been pure anarthria, with retention of the
#intellectual mechanism of speech.  One may suppose the shock to have jogged
#out of position the synapses of the motor conductoion tracts, the wires of
#which have lost their points of contact."

The use of "shock" in the 2nd sentence, plainly anaphoric to
"shell-shock" in the first, is much more consistent with a physical
interpretation than anything like our medical use.

#Two earlier usages in Lancet:
#
#volume 189 page 63, issue of July 10, 1915, "Loss of Personality From "Shell
#Shock"" by Anthony Feiling, M.D. Cantab., MRCP Lond.
#
#The phrase "shell-shock" is not used in the body of the article.

Ambiguous. This looks to me like the physical sense, but it might be the
medical one.

#Volume 188 pages 317-320, issue of February 13, 1915,  "A Contribution to the
#Study of Shell Shock" by Charles S. Myers, M.D., Sc.D. Camb.
#
#from the last paragraph before the acknowledgements, page 320 column
#     "Comment on these cases seems superfluous.  They appear to constitute a
#definitie class among others arising from the effects of shell-shock.  The
#shells in question appear to have burst with considerable noise, scattering
#much dust, but this was not attended by the production of odour.  It is
#therefore difficult to understand why hearing should be (practically)
#unaffected, and the dissociated "complex" be confined to the senses of sight,
#smell, and taste (and to memory).  THe close relation of these cases to those
#of "hysteria" appears fairly certain."

The sentence describing the shell burst, immediately following
"shell-shock", seems to me to support the physical sense. Note also
"[cases] arising from the effects of shell-shock" -- not "[cases] of
shell-shock", as we would expect with the medical sense.

    ---- This is where I moved my opening quote-of-Jim from. ----

#I said in a previous letter that "shell shock" was a euphemism.  Let me
#elaborate.  In 1915 most people, in and out of the military, would describe a
#soldier who had a mental breakdown in combat as a "coward", and would treat
#said soldier with contempt.  On the other hand, if said soldier were
#considered to be suffering from the effects of a battlefield wound, then he
#need not be, and probably was not, a coward but instead a wounded soldier,
#deserving of sympathy.
#
#That is, "shell shock" is not a euphemistic PHRASE but rather a term whose
#use signifies a euphemistic ATTITUDE, or better a changed attitude.  To use
#the term "shell shock" is to admit that this kind of mental breakdown in
#combat was something that could happen to a brave soldier and therefore was
#no reflection on the soldier's bravery.

        [... snip remaining discussion]

We clearly have antedates here of the *expression* "shell shock", with
or without hyphen, but IMHO none of them supports the medical sense,
which *is* clear in OED Online's first two citations:

1915 Brit. Med. Jrnl. 11 Dec. 848/2 The necessity of investigating cases
of "*shell shock" very carefully in order to differentiate those that
are functional from those that are due to organic lesions. 1918 E. A.
MACKINTOSH War, the Liberator 148 The Corporal..collapsed suddenly with
twitching hands and staring, frightened eyes, proclaiming the
shell-shock he had held off while the work was to be done.

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
   Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel