Shell-shock story reproduced in hypnosis. Recovery.
Case 523. (Myers, January, 1916.)
A private had been found wandering in a village, in shirt and socks, unable to give name, regiment, or number. He was admitted at a field ambulance, and seen by Major Myers three days later. No Christian name seemed familiar to him. The past was a blank. He was depressed. There was numbness over the occiput. The legs, hands and tongue were tremulous. The left arm and leg and the left side of the face, chest and abdomen were hypalgesic. The knee-jerks were exaggerated; pseudo-clonus of left knee and right ankle. There had been a nightmare of bombs thrown into trenches—one thrown by a German hit him in the neck and woke him up in a cold sweat.
In hypnosis the dream was repeated, and points about his previous life were dragged out piecemeal. Next, the names of village and near-by town, and finally his own name, regiment and number were elicited. After the bomb-throwing, he said, “I must have gone off my head and run away. I must have taken off my clothes in a field. I spent the first night under a hedge. I spent the next two nights in a wood. I ate nothing. The next night I was walking along a road on the outskirts of a village and I was taken to a house by two men.” On waking, he proved unable to remember these things and was promptly rehypnotized, whereupon the memories became clearer and more ample. More powerful suggestion was given, and complete recovery of memory followed the second period of hypnotism. The pupils became larger. The despondency disappeared, together with the occipital numbness and the left-sided hypalgesia. He was transferred to a base hospital, and thence after three weeks to a hospital in England, made an uninterrupted recovery, and rejoined his regiment.