Search

From 1917 to 1918, Major Arthur Hurst filmed shell-shocked patients home from the war in France. Funded by the Medical Research Committee, and using Pathé cameramen, he recorded soldiers who suffered from intractable movement disorders as they underwent treatment at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley and undertook programs of occupational therapy at Seale Hayne in Devon. As one of the earliest UK medical films, Hurst's efforts may have drawn inspiration from the official documentary of the Battle of the Somme and films made in 1916 by French Army neurologists. Although initially motivated to make use of a novel medium to illustrate lectures, Hurst was alert to the wider appeal of the motion picture and saw an opportunity to position himself in the postwar medical hierarchy. Some “before treatment” shots were reenacted for the camera. Hurst, like some other shell shock doctors, openly used deception as a therapeutic measure. On the basis that the ends justified the means, they defended this procedure as ethical. Clinicians also took advantage of changes in military regulations to address functional symptoms. Claims made of “cures” in the film and associated publications by Hurst were challenged by other doctors treating shell shock. The absence of follow-up data and evidence from war pension files suggested that Hurst may have overstated the effectiveness of his methods. Nevertheless, the message conveyed in the film that chronic cases could be treated in a single session had a powerful resonance for ambitious or charismatic doctors and was revived in World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early years of the First World War, wounded Indian soldiers were treated at hospitals in southern England. Focussing especially on the hospital created within the Royal Pavilion complex in Brighton, this article examines the implications of an episode in which thousands of colonised subjects were located and managed within a metropolitan province. We show how the Indian hospitals became sites of concentrated imperial anxiety, with the potential to destabilise British rule in India itself as well as the English localities in which they were created. In particular, we argue that the agency expressed in Indian soldiers' letters home generated an acute consciousness among British officials of the need to bear in mind subaltern subjects' own networks when managing those hegemonic imperial networks that come more readily to historians' attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shell-shock epidemic of 1915 challenged the capacity and expertise of the British Army's medical services. What appeared to be a novel and complex disorder raised questions of causation and treatment. To address these pressing issues, Moss Side Military Hospital at Maghull became a focus for experiment in the developing field of psychological medicine as clinicians from diverse backgrounds and disciplines were recruited and trained at this specialist treatment unit. By contrast, the Maudsley wing of 4th London General Hospital expanded from the neurology department of King's College Medical School and drew upon the neuropathology research of Frederick Mott at Claybury Asylum. By focusing on the psychodynamics of environmental factors, doctors at Maghull offered an alternative to the physicalist hypotheses (heredity and neuropathy acquired as a result of disease or aberrant behavior) explored at the Maudsley. To understand the cause and pathology of shell shock, both institutions admitted a diverse range of patients and experimented with treatments. The individual attention offered to service patients who were not psychotic allowed psychiatry to develop in a way that had not been possible in the county asylum system. The design and operation of Maghull and the Maudsley provided models for departments of psychological medicine in the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines Lorenz Böhler's modernist system of rationalized fracture care as a particular case of medical rationalization and standardization. Böhler's locally created culture of standardized practices is analyzed in the context of its concrete work environment but also situated in relation to aspects of its wider cultural environment. It will be described as part of a more general trend of body-based rationalization efforts in industry and health care, in which the machine metaphor was used to characterize both the body and the work process. The project's origins in World War I will be discussed, as well as its subsequent migration to a civilian setting and its resonance with postwar Viennese modernism, to which it contributed. The essay aims at contributing to a historically informed discussion of medical rationalization and standardization as a heterogeneous, value-laden, and historically contingent phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent was a nascent international humanitarian sphere challenged by the rise of nationalist aid efforts during the First World War? How did wartime nationalisms influence humanitarian mobilisation? Taking the aid effort to prisoners of war as its central case study, this article contends that the similar evolution of national wartime charities in the different belligerent states was due to a transnational learning process, based on nationalism and reciprocity dynamics, rather than simply a manifestation of a shared culture of international humanitarianism. Comparing similar national aid actors in different countries highlights the fact that the national aid response did not develop solely as a result of 'international' norms, but often on the basis of other motivations, predominantly the desire to help the war effort. This transnational learning process has been identified in some historiographical analysis as evidence for the existence of shared international humanitarian norms within belligerent countries; in fact it is also evidence that certain welfare sectors - for example, registration of the missing and dead, military aid bureaucracies or local scouting or Red Cross associations - evolved similarly in response to the logistical challenges created by total war. This paper contends that the nationalist-orientated evolution of charity at the local level during the war created increasing tensions between the national and international humanitarian spheres and it argues that it is necessary to explore this contested evolution of wartime charity in order to understand the complex nature of wartime mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]