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Shell-shock and other neuropsychiatric problems

Chapter 534: Case 501. (Hurst, March, 1917.)
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About This Book

The work assembles nearly six hundred clinical case histories drawn from wartime medical literature to document combat-related neuropsychiatric disorders. It presents concise case protocols illustrating varied symptom patterns, diagnostic dilemmas, malingering and simulation, therapeutic interventions, and treatment outcomes, and includes bibliographic references and introductory commentary. Sections juxtapose cases to illuminate contested diagnoses and to inform postwar rehabilitation and mental-hygiene efforts, aiming to provide clinicians and reconstruction workers with detailed clinical material for recognizing, classifying, and managing neuropsychiatric consequences of war.

Officer dies in convulsions: Servant develops hysterical convulsions, which vanish on being explained as such.

Case 501. (Hurst, March, 1917.)

An officer and his servant were blown up by a shell. The servant ran to fetch a stretcher for the officer, to whom he was much attached, but on his return the officer made a few convulsive movements and died. Immediately after, the servant had a fit. During the next two months he had eleven more. Hurst made a diagnosis of hysterical fits resulting from emotion, explained his idea of their origin and nature to the servant, and the convulsions then ceased completely.

Re hysterical convulsions, see remarks under Case 443.