Patients: The Other Ranks

Abstract

The disciplinary and analytic models of shell shock treatment at Queen Square and Maghull give some indication of how soldiers encountered military medicine and hospitals during the Great War. In this and the following chapter, by exploring both soldiers’and doctors’perspectives on treatment in practice, a more detailed picture emerges of how institutions and individuals were involved in making shell shock; of how the condition emerged in the interaction between doctor and patient, in the implementation of institutional rules and treatment techniques, in the antagonistic friction between doctor, patient and military authority. One instance of the way traumatic neurosis was marked by social interaction is in its definition and treatment according to rank. Within the Army, and therefore within the Army Medical Service, rank decisively influenced the opportunities and rights of the individual soldier. In combat rank shaped life-chances, in social encounter rank defined peer group reaction and self-perception, and in sickness too, rank fashioned attitude and expectation, which then guided the formation and presentation of symptoms as well as sanctioning the type and extent of treatment. The collective, popular memory of shell shock treatment is also influenced by rank. United by upbringing, education and social status, officers have been better able to describe their experiences of combat, and these accounts are more widely known in both the medical literature and memoirs of the Great War.