Shell Shock

[James A. Landau]

I am not going to argue with Mark, because I have read the articles in
question and he has not, and it would embarrass the whole list to force Mark
to rebut me by guesswork.  Example: in the exchange quoted below, the article
states that the soldier in question, after a period of heavy combat (length
unknown but not more than ten days), was buried for twelve hours in a
collapsed trench (the collapse being caused by a shellburst)---additional
data that Mark did NOT have available when analyzing the citation I provided.

I have no way of knowing whether the title was supplied by the author, who
had examined the soldier at great length, or by some Lancet editor.  I can
only guess as to why "shell shock" appeared in quotation marks in the title.

In a message dated 3/29/03 1:48:12 PM Eastern Standard Time, mam at THEWORLD.COM
writes:

> #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.

The only reasonable conclusions from my e-mail was that
1) doctors were frequently using the term "shell shock" by the beginning of
1915
2) sources in addition to Lancet will have to be consulted
3) doctors in 1915 were somewhat fixated on shell explosions---no reflection
on them, it took at least until World War II to see that this was a post hoc
ergo propter hoc
4) some doctors in 1915 used "shell shock" to mean "the shock wave from an
exploding artillery shell", some used it to describe the syndrome now known
as PTSD, and I'm sure some used it in both meanings.

        - Jim Landau