| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. By Ben Shephard. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xxiv, 487 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-674-00592-9.)

Military psychiatry developed in response to the first "industrial wars" of the twentieth century (primarily the Russo-Japanese war and World War I), when high explosives and machine guns were unleashed against infantrymen. The result was the emergence of a new kind of casualty: masses of men exhibiting shocking symptoms, such as hysterical blindness, paralysis, stammering, loss of memory, and uncontrollable shaking, were suddenly thrown into military hospitals. In past eras, such men would probably have been viewed as cowards or malingerers and appropriate subjects for discipline, but the scale of these casualties and the resulting public concern produced a new approach, in which these problems were medicalized and the victims turned over to army psychiatrists for "treatment." 1

In A War of Nerves, Ben Shephard examines the trend toward the medicalization of the mental casualties of war in an expansive survey of military psychiatry from World War I to the Gulf War. Shephard covers a wide variety of topics such as methods of treatment, military manpower policy, and the fate of veterans and POWs (prisoners of war). His basic thesis is that the medical view of psychiatric breakdown (the "dramatist" viewpoint) must be merged with the military view of such breakdown (the "realist" viewpoint) and that "things worked best when the two strands interacted in creative tension." . . .

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