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Books > Medicine > Other branches of medicine > Accident & emergency medicine > Trauma & shock
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Breakdown - The Crisis of Shell Shock on the Somme (Paperback)
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Breakdown - The Crisis of Shell Shock on the Somme (Paperback)
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Paralysis. Stuttering. The 'shakes'. Inability to stand or walk.
Temporary blindness or deafness. When strange symptoms like these
began appearing in men at Casualty Clearing Stations in 1915, a
debate began in army and medical circles as to what it was, what
had caused it and what could be done to cure it. But the numbers
were never large. Then in July 1916 with the start of the Somme
battle the incidence of shell shock rocketed. The high command of
the British army began to panic. An increasingly large number of
men seemed to have simply lost the will to fight. As entire
battalions had to be withdrawn from the front, commanders and
military doctors desperately tried to come up with explanations as
to what was going wrong. 'Shell shock' - what we would now refer to
as battle trauma - was sweeping the Western Front. By the beginning
of August 1916, nearly 200,000 British soldiers had been killed or
wounded during the first month of fighting along the Somme. Another
300,000 would be lost before the battle was over. But the army
always said it could not calculate the exact number of those
suffering from shell shock. Re-assessing the official casualty
figures, Taylor Downing for the first time comes up with an
accurate estimate of the total numbers who were taken out of action
by psychological wounds. It is a shocking figure. Taylor Downing's
revelatory new book follows units and individuals from signing up
to the Pals Battalions of 1914, through to the horrors of their
experiences on the Somme which led to the shell shock that,
unrelated to weakness or cowardice, left the men unable to continue
fighting. He shines a light on the official - and brutal - response
to the epidemic, even against those officers and doctors who looked
on it sympathetically. It was, they believed, a form of hysteria.
It was contagious. And it had to be stopped. Breakdown brings an
entirely new perspective to bear on one of the iconic battles of
the First World War.
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