Shell-shock and medical culture in First World War Britain / Tracey Loughran.

  • Loughran, Tracey
Date:
2016
  • Books

About this work

Description

Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain' is a thought-provoking reassessment of medical responses to war-related psychological breakdown in the early twentieth century. Dr Loughran places shell-shock within the historical context of British psychological medicine to examine the intellectual resources doctors drew on as they struggled to make sense of nervous collapse. She reveals how medical approaches to shell-shock were formulated within an evolutionary framework which viewed mental breakdown as regression to a level characteristic of earlier stages of individual or racial development, but also ultimately resulted in greater understanding and acceptance of psychoanalytic approaches to human mind and behaviour. Through its demonstration of the crucial importance of concepts of mind-body relations, gender, willpower and instinct to the diagnosis of shell-shock, this book locates the disorder within a series of debates on human identity dating back to the Darwinian revolution and extending far beyond the medical sphere.

Publication/Creation

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Physical description

xi, 279 pages ; 24 cm.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: "Shell-Shock" and Medical Culture in First World War Britain -- Frameworks of Understanding : Reconstructing the Human from Darwin to the First World War -- Languages of Diagnosis : Hysteria, Neurasthenia and Changing Pre-War Psychological Medicine -- Body and Mind in "Shell-Shock" : War and Change within Psychological Medicine -- Reading Silences : Gender and Class in Medical Discourse on "Shell-Shock" -- Re-Making Men : Will in Medical Approaches to "Shell-Shock" -- Animal Bodies and Minds : Instinct and Regression in "Shell-Shock" -- Conclusion: "Shell-Shock" and Post-War Medical Culture.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    PP.UC.41
    Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9781107128903
  • 1107128900