Shell-shock and other neuropsychiatric problems

Chapter 577: Case 544. (Eder, August, 1916.)

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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.

Recurrent hysterical mutism. Spontaneous recovery in (a) 18 months (antebellum incident). (b) Hypnotic recovery in a few minutes.

Case 544. (Eder, August, 1916.)

A soldier in a mine accident eight years before the war, lost his speech when his brother was killed, and then recovered his speech spontaneously after 18 months.

After a shell explosion in Gallipoli, he was again struck speechless and also deaf.

Six weeks later, he came to Dr. Eder and objected in writing to treatment, saying that he believed in nature’s methods. God had taken his voice away before and had restored it. Eder replied in writing “rather irreverently” that God had taken 18 months, but he could do it in a few minutes. The patient afterward consented to treatment, and speech and hearing were duly restored in the time promised, whereupon Dr. Eder told him that in point of fact his physician was merely the instrument of Providence.