Author:Ben Shephard
'I wish you could be here," the Oxford Professor of Medicine wrote to a friend in 1915, "in this orgy of neuroses and psychoses and gaits and paralyses. I cannot imagine what has got into the central nervous system of the men.'
A War of Nerves is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century - an authoritative, accessible account drawing on a vast range of diaries, interviews, medical papers and official records. It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of mental medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of 'shell-shock', combat fatigue and 'post-traumatic stress disorder'.
At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, it tells the full story of 'shell-shock'; explains the disastrous psychological aftermath of Vietnam; and shows how psychiatrists kept men fighting in Burma. But it also tries to answer recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology or simple biochemistry? It explores the ethical dilemmas of the military psychiatrist - the 'machine gun behind the front', as Freud called him. Finally, it looks at the modern culture of 'trauma' and compensation spawned by the Vietnam War.
A War of Nerves offers the general reader an indispensable guide to an important and controversial subject.
Shephard's engaging and impressively researched study offers a detailed survey of psychiatric - and to a lesser extent, social and cultural - responses to war trauma from the First World War to the Gulf War of 1991... Thorough, thought-provoking and enormously informative
—— Paul Lerner , Times Literary SupplementThis detailed study of psychiatric casualties in war will surely become the standard work of reference on this complex, difficult subject...enthralling
—— Anthony Storr , The TimesOutstanding... Shepard tells this story with the skill of a thriller-writer as well as the assiduous pride of a historian... A bold, harrowing, provocative, fiercely intelligent work
—— Charles Fernyhough , Scotland on SundayAn utterly absorbing study of the century-long relationship between psychiatry and the military... The richness of his story derives from the sheer variety of experiences and personalities that it incorporates
—— Richard Overy , Literary ReviewLively, discursive, constantly absorbing...succeeds for the most part in maintaining an admirably dispassionate position between the dismissive strictures of the hardened critic of modern psychiatry on the one hand and the exuberant messianic certainties of the zealots of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and drugs on the other
—— Anthony Clare , Sunday TimesHe examines every branch of warfare in its history, psychology, metallurgy, genetics, logistics, archaeology, tactics and strategy...He is as much at home in the Empire of Babylon as he is on the Somme...On every subject he has something fresh to say. His learning is staggering and his gift for exposition unequalled.
—— Nigel Nicolson , Daily TelegraphKeegan's power as a writer derives from the fact that he does not see himself merely as a chronicler of battles, but as a student of the human condition. It is the breadth of his grasp of civilisation, as well as of the soldier's art, that makes this book so formidable.
—— Max Hastings , Evening Standard
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