| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Ben Shephard. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xxiii, 487. $27.95.

To my great delight, this turned out to be a history not just of "shell shock" in the British and American armies over the course of the twentieth century but of the role of psychiatry in military planning and of the general development of psychiatry and neurology from World War I until our own times. Ben Shephard writes fluently with plenty of anecdotes and detail, and the work as a whole is a tour de force that takes us from the desperation of being "blown up" in the trenches of the Great War—and the medical debates about how to handle it—to the much stricter army policies about psychiatric evacuation in World War II, then finally to the choreographed American routines for handling combat trauma in Vietnam. The Vietnam experience culminated in the illness label Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a political diagnosis that arose from a systematic campaign of Vietnam veterans in the 1970s directed at official psychiatry. It is a diagnosis that today is spreading epidemically in the civilian population facing far lesser traumas than enemy fire. . . .

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