Written on the Body

Abstract

This chapter examines the language of illness, sickness, and death in war-time use – in a domain which offered its own conflicted spaces of both erasure and over-lexicalisation, and euphemism alongside dysphemism. As Clark’s ‘Words in War-Time’, records, popular discourses of health readily appropriated military metaphors in ways that evoked other synergies between Home and active fronts (‘If your line of health is “weakly held” strengthen your forces with Bovril’, as advertising in the Scotsman announced in March 1915). In contrast, human vulnerabilities as embedded in trench warfare as literal rather than metaphorical process yielded a rapidly expanding lexicon, evident in the shifting understanding of trench foot, trench fever, and frostbite, or the reorientation of the diction of nerves and nerviness in which shellshock (and raid-shock on the Home Front) can remain prominent legacies.