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The issue of First World War shell shock has been documented mainly from a medical perspective. Many medical texts dealing with war psychoneuroses and their aggressive treatments, such as electrotherapy, were published during the war. Accounts from shell-shocked soldiers are rare. Nevertheless, shell shock was described from a non-medical point of view by a few writers who had undergone or witnessed this pathology. Their texts deal mainly with the psychiatric forms, the most striking ones, but also with the more common concepts of commotion, emotion and pathological fear. The French philosopher Émile Chartier (1868-1951), alias Alain, described the commotional syndrome from which he suffered. The German writer Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), a brave officer and an example for his men, reported his emotional shock. Some psychiatric forms of shell shock are present in the work of the pacifist writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), the naturalist Maurice Genevoix (1890-1980), who suffered himself from a section of the left median and ulnar nerves, or the British poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). War hysteria and pathological fear have been described, on several occasions, by Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) or the German writer Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970). Electrotherapy has been scarcely reported except by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961).

Many artists were involved in the First World War. Some of them were mobilized, like millions of soldiers, others enlisted to fight on the battlefield. The stories of writers who returned neurologically wounded from the war, such as Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) or Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), are well-known. The cases of painters and sculptors who suffered from First World War neurological wounds are scarce. Nevertheless, their injuries led to intense modifications of artistic practice. We detail four examples of artists whose creative mind was impacted by their First World War neurological wounds or diseases. The painter Jean-Julien Lemordant (1878-1968), who suffered from blindness after his injury, stopped his artistic work and became an icon of Franco-American friendship. The sculptor Maurice Prost (1894-1967), suffering from a neuroma due to the loss of his arm, built a special device to continue his work as a wildlife artist. The painter Georges Braque (1882-1963) was trepanned but carried on with his cubist work without ever mentioning the conflict. Conversely, the painter Fernand Léger (1881-1955), who suffered from a war neurosis, produced a significant war testimony through drawings and letters.

The writer Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) developed a personal style which changed twentieth century French literature. As an enlisted soldier in 1912, he was involved in the Great War and his right arm was severely wounded. After the war, he became a medical doctor and a writer who published his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), in 1932. In the middle of the 1930s, he began to write anti-Semitic and racist pamphlets and turned to a collaborationist stance with Nazi Germany. After the Second World War, he was declared a national disgrace in France and fled to Denmark. In 1951, he was granted amnesty and went back to France, where he regained fame with his last three novels. Céline was a First World War neurologically wounded soldier who received a severe injury in the right arm leading to a radial nerve paralysis. Furthermore, in his texts and letters, he complained of many symptoms that he considered to be related to the First World War. In reality, to build a heroic image of himself, Céline rewrote his personal First World War history, in particular his war wounds. The aim of this reconstruction was to help him achieve literary fame. At the end of the Second World War, he also used this rewriting to organise his defence when he was accused and tried for collaborationism. Using medical and military archives, Céline's First World War medical mythology is reviewed to distinguish facts from fiction concerning his wound and other war neurological disturbances. We present the history of his radial nerve lesion and surgery, and confirm that Céline was never trepanned. Two other controversial neurological points, his left ear disease and his possible shell shock, are also discussed.

Camptocormia is defined as an involuntary flexion of the thoracolumbar spine, without fixed kyphosis, which increases during walking and standing, and abates in the supine position. First described during World War 1 in soldiers suffering from war psychoneuroses, camptocormia has progressively come to refer to any cause of trunk forward-flexed posture during standing and ambulation. It is now admitted that camptocormia should be considered as a syndrome related to many etiologies. In this chapter, we present the historical aspects of the syndrome and its main etiologies. We highlight camptocormia in Parkinson disease and its relationships with Pisa syndrome.

Since its initial description in 1851, Munchausen syndrome has been widely used interchangeably with factitious disorder. Nevertheless, this syndrome is only one form of factitious disorder that is both severe and chronic. The syndrome was named after Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron von Münchhausen (1720-1797), a German nobleman who became famous as a narrator of false and exaggerated exploits. His name was progressively corrupted to Munchausen. Factitious disorders and Munchausen syndrome remain a great diagnosis challenge for physicians. All medical specialities are concerned by these disorders. The diagnosis process involves a first step to exclude an unusual presentation of a common medical condition. The second step consists of excluding somatoform disorders and malingering. Unfortunately, the boundaries between factitious disorder, somatization, and malingering are often unclear. In 1977, the term "Munchausen's syndrome by proxy" was coined to define a situation where a person produces false symptoms in another one, especially a child. This term was extended to similar interactions between human and pets. Because varied conditions have been included in the definition of this syndrome, there is ongoing debate about alternative names.

Body representation disorders continue to be mysterious and involve the anatomical substrate that underlies the mental representation of the body. These disorders sit on the boundaries of neurological and psychiatric diseases. We present the main characteristics of 3 examples of body representation disorders: phantom sensations, supernumerary phantom limb, and apotemnophilia. The dysfunction of anatomical circuits that regulate body representation can sometimes have paradoxical features. In the case of phantom sensations, the patient feels the painful subjective sensation of the existence of the lost part of the body after amputation, surgery or trauma. In case of apotemnophilia, now named body integrity identity disorder, the subject wishes for the disappearance of the existing and normal limb, which can occasionally lead to self-amputation. More rarely, a brain-damaged patient with 4 existing limbs can report the existence of a supernumerary phantom limb.

The Great War accelerated the development of neurological knowledge. Many neurological signs and syndromes, as well as new nosological entities such as war psychoneuroses, were described during the conflict. The period between 1914 and 1918 was the first time in which many neurologists were concentrated in wartime neurology centres and confronted with a number of neurological patients never seen before. This concentration led to the publication of papers concerning all fields of neurological sciences, and these reports pervaded scientific journals during the conflict and the post-war years. The careers of French neurologists during the war were highly varied. Some were mobilised, whilst others enlisted voluntarily. They worked as regiment physicians at the front or in wartime neurology centres at the front or at the rear. Others were academics who were already authoritative names in the field of neurology. Whilst they were too old to be officially mobilised, they nevertheless worked in their militarised neurology departments of civil hospitals. We present here the careers of a few French neurologists during the Great War, including Charles Foix (1882-1927), René Cruchet (1875-1959), Georges Guillain (1876-1961), Jean Lhermitte (1877-1959), Clovis Vincent (1879-1947), Gustave Roussy (1874-1948), and Paul Sollier (1861-1933).

Between 1914 and 1918, war strain appeared under a number of guises and affected, to varying extents, the majority of French soldiers. The most frequent form of war strain was war psychoneurosis, but war strain also induced more paroxystic disorders, such as acute episodes of terror, self-mutilation, induced illnesses and even suicide. Fear was the constant companion of soldiers of the Great War: soldiers were either able to tame it or overwhelmed by an uncontrollable fear. Nonetheless, over the course of the war, some aspects of fear were recognised as syndromes. The French health service poorly anticipated the major consequences of war strain, as with many other types of injuries. After the establishment of wartime neuropsychiatric centres, two main medical stances emerged: listening to soldiers empathetically on the one hand and applying more repressive management on the other. For many physicians, the psychological consequences of this first modern war were synonymous with malingering or cowardice in the face of duty. The stance of French military physicians in relation to their command was not unequivocal and remained ambivalent, swaying between medico-military collusion and empathy towards soldiers experiencing psychological distress. The ubiquity of suspected malingering modified the already porous borders between neuropsychiatric disorders and disobedience. Several war psychoneurotic soldiers were sentenced by councils of war for deserting their posts in the face of the enemy and were shot. Many soldiers suspected of self-mutilation or suffering from induced illnesses were also sentenced and executed without an expert assessment of their wound or their psychological state.

The hippocampus is a temporal brain structure belonging to the limbic lobe and is fundamentally involved in memory processing, learning, and emotions. It consists of two allocortex laminae: the gyrus dentatus and the cornu ammonis, one rolled up inside the other, creating a bulge in the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle. Arterial vascularization of the hippocampus is dependent on the collateral branches of the posterior cerebral artery and the anterior choroidal artery, forming the network of superficial hippocampal arteries that in turn lead to deep intrahippocampal arteries. Venous vascularization is provided by the intrahippocampal veins, which drain into the superficial hippocampal veins. Knowledge of anatomical organization and vascularization of the hippocampus is essential to understanding its dysfunctions and its appearance on MRI.

The literary work of Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), né Frédéric Sauser, one of the major French-speaking authors of the 20th century, is imbued with references to neuropsychiatry. This theme is a constant presence in his writing as a result of his involvement of the First World War and his personal experiences, which were punctuated with neurologic and psychiatric events. Cendrars' own particular ideas on the genesis of mental disorders went against the more traditional views on psychiatry. He remained skeptical about hysteria and did not subscribe to psychoanalysis. His ideas were enriched by his experience with the war-related neuropsychiatric problems developed by soldiers. He thus proposed the notion of 'pathological fear' surrounding these disorders. There are a number of characters suffering from 'borderline' mental disorders in Cendrars' work, including two shocking, mad murderers, Moravagine and Fébronio. The character Moravagine, a neurology patient suffering from a brain tumor, enabled Cendrars to delve into the grey areas that can exist between neurologic and psychiatric diseases. Fébronio, a real psychotic, enabled Cendrars to explore ethnopsychiatry.

We present a brain map of the areas supplied by various arteries in the brainstem, cerebellum and cerebral hemispheres. Arterial territories are depicted in a form that is directly applicable to neuroimaging slices in clinical practice. The arterial territories are outlined based on an extensive overview of anatomical studies of cerebral blood supply. For arterial territories of the hemispheres, we present the variability of the cortical territories of the three main cerebral arteries and define the minimal and maximal cortical supply areas.