Shocking Modernity: Hysteria, Technology and Warfare

Abstract

The proper starting point for the study of traumatic neurosis during the Great War is the mid- and late nineteenth century. It is at this time that nervous disorders resembling those that became so prominent between 1914 and 1918 began to appear in the workplace, at the site of the train crash and on the battlefield. It is at this time that employers, politicians and generals started to notice traumatic neurosis. Medics did the same as they encountered these new forms of hysteria, and usually their clinical gaze was coloured by the requirements of morality, money and manpower. To understand what was later calledshell shock then, it is necessary to appreciate something of the technological and medical developments in Europe and America in the decades before the Great War, of their relationship to Western Front warfare and the processes of psychic self- protection those workers on the shop floor and in the trenches had to develop to survive the shocks and rattles of modern industrial labour.