A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



" To the solid ground 

 Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye."— Wordsworth. 



^THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1917. 



THE PSYCHOPATHY OF THE BARBED 

 WIRE. 

 Shell-shock and Its Lessons. By Prof. G. Elliot 

 Smith and T. H. Pear. Pp. 'xi+135. (Man- 

 chester : At the University Press ; ^ London : 

 Longmans, Green, and Co., 191 7.) Price 

 2S. 6d. net. 



T^HE conditions of modern warfare, with its 

 * trench life, its sudden gas and bomb attacks, 

 the extraordinary intensity of newly discovered 

 explosives, their variety, ' and also their long- 

 continued effects when directed against human 

 beings in a life-and-death struggle, have created 

 among our men at the front such an amount of 

 nervous and .mental tension that the war has dis- 

 closed manifestations never previously anticipated, 

 and the appellation to some of these states of the 

 term "psycho-neuroses " is amply justified. These 

 conditions are, however, rare in the trenches, 

 although far from uncommon behind the lines, in 

 the field hospitals, at the base, and especially at 

 home. They occur also in labour battalions, and 

 even among those who have never crossed the 

 Channel. Nevertheless, we owe an inexpressible 

 debt to all our menfolk in the line ; they have suf- 

 fered long and endured many things with the 

 dogged determination to win victory for liberty, 

 social justice, and human brotherhood. The price 

 we pay for deathless courage and for records of 

 supreme self-sacrifice on the part of officers and 

 men, who lay down their lives to guard our homes 

 and to protect our and their own flesh and blood, 

 implies an intense stress and strain, resulting in 

 many instances in a complete breakdown of mind 

 and body ; yet the proportion of mental cases is 

 not so large as might have been expected, although 

 their number in the aggregate with so great an 

 army is naturally high. 



This little treatise of five short chapters, desig- 

 nated " Shell-shock " — it would have been more 

 laccurate, we think, to have called it "War-shock," 

 NO. 2497, VOL. 100] 



for the conditions described have been witnessed 

 in cases that have not been to the front — purposes 

 to give an account of some of the nervous and 

 mental states associated with the war, and it has 

 several lessons to teach. Most noticeable is the 

 changed relationship here accepted between the 

 mind and the body, for in place of the usual psycho- 

 physical parallelism (of which Wundt was the 

 chief pre-war exponent), which affirms that there 

 is no causal relation between the processes in the 

 one series and those in the other, we now have 

 the view put forward that there exists a reciprocal 

 causal relation between the two — but with stress 

 laid upon the psychical series. It is assumed by 

 the authors that a cerebral disturbance (physical) 

 Is causejl by an object through the organs of sense, 

 which gives rise to a sensation (psychic), and this, 

 when cognised, causes a feeling or an emotion 

 with a conative tendency (psychic), resulting in 

 some further cerebral disturbance (physical), which 

 eventually results In a motor reaction. This, in 

 short — If the reviewer rightly Interprets the mean- 

 ing implied — Is the view taken by the joint authors, 

 one of whom is a 3lstlngulshed anatomist and the 

 other a student of psychology, both being guided 

 in their new field of experience by the able 

 psychiatrist to whom the volume Is dedicated. 



The essay Is characterised by three main 

 features : first, as stated, the tendency through- 

 out to magnify as the predominant partner the 

 first element In the psycho-physical relationship 

 and therefore tending to dwell, we think unduly, 

 upon the value of suggestion, dream analysis,^ 

 hypnotism, "psycho-analysis," and personal mag- 

 netism, nothing being said of massage, electricity, 

 or baths ; secondly, the great stress laid upon nur- 

 ture rather than nature, which shows the authors 

 to be out-and-out environmentalists ; and thirdly — 

 which does not appear to follow as a corollary 

 from a disquisition upon " shell-shock " — the con- 

 stant effort made to convince the public of the 

 neces.slty for reform in the treatment of the insane, 

 the urgent need for reconstructing the admlnlstrS- 



1 "^ee al'O " O'cim P-ivcHolbev." Oy M.iurice NicoU. (London ■ 

 H. Frowde, and Hodder and Stoughton.) 



