Tackling Shell Shock in Great War Oxford: Thomas Saxty Good, William McDougall, and James Arthur Hadfield

Shell shock was an important object of diagnostic and therapeutic concern in Oxford during the Great War. The efforts of three Oxford physicians--Thomas Saxty Good, William McDougall, and James Arthur Hadfield--are of particular significance to our story. All worked on the problem at various sites throughout the city. They often collaborated. All were committed to employing innovative techniques such as psychotherapy and hypnosis. Each rose, to differing extents, to prominence in the field of psychological medicine during the succeeding decades. Yet all have been neglected in the current historiography. I argue that a close examination of their practices reveals a curious combination of therapeutic pragmatism and psychoanalytically informed techniques that later helped inform clinical psychology's challenge to psychiatry's dominance over the concept and care of mental disorder.