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Physicians have long believed that disturbing experiences arouse intense emotions that can cause illness and disease. Similarly, human behaviors that can be interpreted in the diagnostic language of our own time as post-traumatic pathology date back to classical times. The first medical instances of describing, labeling, and treating such behaviors appeared during the seventeenth century, when army doctors typically regarded the cases as an organic disease of an unknown nature, cowardice, or malingering. Traumatic neurosis as a distinct psychiatric category, however, with an independent diagnostic identity and psychological – or mixed somatic and psychological – origins emerged in Western Europe and North America only during the last third of the nineteenth century. The period 1870–1910 witnessed an unprecedented burst of creative psychological theorizing in Europe and the United States. This was the founding generation of modern psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy during which the sciences of the mind largely assumed the theoretical and professional forms in which we know them today. The observation and theorization of psychological trauma played no small part in this intellectual development. One of the first physicians of this period to explore systematically the idea of posttraumatic pathology and to write extensively about it – and who was a direct and demonstrable inspiration to medical traumatologists in the next generation – was the Parisian neuropsychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot. THE BACKGROUND TO CHARCOT'S WORK ON TRAUMATIC NEUROSIS Charcot (1825–1893) studied trauma during the second half of his career, from the later 1870s through to his death in the early 1890s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed that eastern Central Europe was always a stronghold of Catholicism. This assumption, which rests on the outcome of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, ignores the fact that Protestantism was so widespread in the area throughout the sixteenth century that it largely reduced the Catholic Church to a minority. It endangered not only the church, but also the Catholic monarchy, for Protestantism everywhere in eastern Central Europe was rooted in the strong political position of the estates: in Poland, the Bohemian lands (Bohemia itself and the incorporated crown lands, Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia), Hungary and the east Austrian provinces of Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Karinthia, Styria and Krain. On the one hand, the firm representative system of the estates favoured and encouraged acceptance of the confessional alternative to the Catholic monarchy. On the other, Protestantism gave the estates a new and superior (because religious) basis for their self-awareness and their political aim of extending and consolidating their independence. Throughout the region the estates were in a strong position to restrict the freedom of action of the ruling power. In Bohemia, for instance, the king's military and financial requirements depended on the agreement of the Landtag (sném) or diet, and its willingness to raise taxes. So did the election and coronation of his successor. Laws could be passed only with the agreement of all three estates (curiae) of the diet: the higher nobility or barons, the lower nobility or knights, and the royal free cities. The supreme court (Landrecht) and the provincial government were made up of representatives of the nobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]