Shell Shock

[Mark A Mandel]

On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, James A. Landau wrote:

#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.

And I am not going to argue with James because he has better information
than I do.

#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.

#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.

And I can agree with all of those.

-- Mark M.