Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (review)

Eleven essays, preceded by an exceptionally valuable editors' introduction, are here culled from a conference held more than six years ago at the University of Manchester. Alas, Cambridge University Press, while wise in publishing Traumatic Pasts at a time when most scholarly presses shun collections from conferences, might have allowed the editors to include even more of the proceedings.

The first segment of the collection includes two new essays by Ralph Harrington and Eric Caplan, both extending previously published work on the psychiatric victims of late nineteenth-century railway accidents.¹ Caplan and Harrington together recover an Anglo-American story of surgeons puzzling over the pathophysiology of accident victims who display no overt, surgically reparable wounds. Harrington links the surgeons' debates to larger contemporary anxieties about broad and irreversible social and technological changes. Caplan shows how and why U.S. surgeons working for railway companies were explicitly encouraged to accept and extend in clinical practice a model of psychological, rather than somatic, damage. American surgeons, even more than neurologists and psychiatrists of the 1890s and early 1900s, advanced the nascent field of psychotherapy in the United States.

The second section, "Work, Accidents and Trauma in the Early Welfare State," best approaches the editors' goal of offering new material to the discussion of state and modernity in the 1870-1930 period. Wolfgang Schäffner ("Event, Series, Trauma: The Probabilistic Revolution of the Mind in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century") and Greg A. Eghigian ("The German Welfare State as a Discourse of Trauma") venture farthest from the history of psychiatry as a clinical specialty and medical ideology, but also reflect a different aspect of state medicine and disease causality than might characterize a review of German medicine focused on germ-theory luminaries. Schäffner reviews the impact of accident and disability legislation first promulgated in the 1880s. Physicians acted as "surveyors" for the state, for the purposes of determining risks pensions; psychological trauma related to the management of omnipresent risk. Eghigian's essay then pursues the ways in which accident legislation was built on a revision of the concepts of accident and blame, the role and purpose of health insurance, and the state's obligation "to therapeutically identify, distribute, and, where possible, eliminate these risks" (p. 111).

Lisa Cardyn's contribution, "The Construction of Female Sexual Trauma in Turn-of-the-Century American Mental Medicine," is grouped with Micale's and Lerner's papers in the third section of the collection, "Theorizing Trauma." Cardyn shows that a few elite New England physicians, informed by the larger Euro-American worry about trauma, began to reconsider more effectively the meaning and therapy of women's domestic, posttraumatic experiences. Micale returns to Charcot in this section; Lerner's study of Hermann Oppenheim will be new and useful to many readers.

Section 4 provides some new research contributions to a fairly well known body of literature on "shell shock"—the memorable and nonerasable English term coined during the First World War. Peter Leese ("Why Are They Not Cured? British Shellshock Treatment during the Great War") explores the resilience of the term. Marc Roudebush ("A Battle of Nerves: Hysteria and Its Treatments in France during World War I") probes the gendered aspects of labeling much-needed soldiers as "hysterics," exposing the national and political context of 1910s psychiatrists who confronted a universal, even "epidemic" soldiers' response to mechanized killing fields. Caroline Cox provides quite a useful, succinct contribution to medical and military history with her "Invisible Wounds: The American Legion, Shell-Shocked Veterans, and American Society, 1919-1924," illustrating the political savvy and expertise of veterans, both old-timers in the GAR and World War I veterans, in securing help...