Science as cultural practice: psychiatry in the First World War and Weimar Germany.

Abstract

Indeed, according to the statistics of the German Army Medical Service’s official report for the years 1914–1918, some 613,047 members of the field and reserve armies were treated in military hospitals for ‘diseases of the nervous system’. These ‘war hysterics’, ‘tremblers’, ‘traumatic or shellshock neurotics’, known to contemporary medical parlance largely as ‘war neurotics’, have only recently attracted the attention of cultural history. The topic forms part of current historical research into everyday life and mentalites during the first world war, and raises questions about the connection between social and psychic change. The problem of destructive transformation of the personality of first world war combatants and its effects on the history of the interwar period was first investigated by Klaus Theweleit in Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 34(1), 125–144. [0022-0094(199901)34:1;125–144;006897]