Enlightened or barbaric? Re-evaluating shell shock treatment

The vastly contrasting treatment approaches for shell shock devised by Dr William Rivers at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh and Dr LewisYealland at the Queen Square Neurological Hospital in London are indicative of the disparate response of WWI medical professionals to the unprecedented number of afflicted soldiers. Their respective legacies have been subject to equally contrasting evaluations in modern times: Rivers is heralded as a 'founding father' in psychotherapy; his methods celebrated for their compassion and humanity, while Yealland's techniques have found closer comparison with torture and sadistic experimentation. This paper argues that judgments of these two physicians are guilty of oversight, and consequently, in Yealland's case particularly, warrant a more nuanced assessment. Besides the miles of destroyed countryside, maimed bodies, and interminable bloodshed, the horrors of trench warfare gave rise to a new kind of malady. It chose no sides, but in all cases, having suffered no discernible physical injury, soldiers succumbed to a variety of debilitating and yet mysterious behaviours: shrieking fits, paralysis, blindness or muteness, to name but a few. This neurosis decimated the soldier's ability to function, let alone fight, and the victims began to congest military hospitals, puzzling doctors more accustomed to dealing with conventional battle field casualties. Charles Myers, a British psychologist, ascribed the symptoms to extreme mental stress, utilising a term already familiar to men in the trenches: 'shell shock'.