| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner, editors. Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930. (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 316. $59.95.

For a subject whose very vocabulary has entered everyday language, from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to "trauma units" of hospital emergency rooms, to "traumatized" tales in any number of psychological and psychoanalytic registers, the editors and authors of this book keep a clear focus on the individuals, institutions, and situations that created trauma as a historical subject, roughly from 1870 to 1930. This was a period when the term began to acquire its psychological meanings, a moment of strained modernism reinforced by the legacies of the Great War in Europe and the social and cultural struggles of the inter war period. Here are stories of contests and contentions by journalists, politicians, medical and military professionals, and administrative bureaucrats in search of ways to capture, define, and make effective use of trauma, whether in the service of the welfare state, the clinic, the army, or veterans' interest groups. 1

The editors begin with a survey of "trauma" and its legacies in contemporary parlance, including PTSD, and a hint at the role that traumatic thinking has played in the historiographies of shattering phenomena such as the Holocaust, international genocide, and the mass warfare of the twentieth century. This is a useful concession to "relevance," although the focus of this volume is not on legacies, but antecedents. This is archaeological work, seeking out the precise moments and contexts in which "trauma" was evoked in railway accidents, in insurance and social welfare debates, in hysteria diagnoses, and how it was adapted and appropriated to explain—and to justify—the stupendous violence of world war. . . .

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