Shell-shock as a Social Disease

Abstract

Both during and after the 1914–18 war, shell-shocked men joined others labelled as deviants in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stereotypes were available to cope with an avalanche of psychiatric casualties, the treatment of whom was uncertain and mostly ineffective. When lost for aetiology or proven treatment, both doctors and those who wrote about manliness and morale converged on a notion of shell shock which located it within the degenerate categories well known at the time.