Notes:

Medicine first became interested in reactions to stress through the military. In the American Civil War soldiers were frequently diagnosed with soldier’s heart when they suffered chest pains and palpitations. The Civil War medicos blamed a functional cardiac disorder.

This picture is sort of interesting and worth a bit of an aside. It was taken by Mathew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer. It was taken in 1862 after the battle at Antietam. And like the television coverage of the Vietnam war a century later its public exhibition in New York shocked the public with the savagery of war. Interesting because the film was black and white it was difficult to tell the Union form the Confederate dead.

In World War I, anxiety symptoms were called shell shock and were thought related to lesions in the central nervous system.

These very physical (as opposed to psychological) theoretical stances began to disappear in the early 1900s, for two reasons primarily. Firstly it became clear that people were suffering the symptoms of shell shock even when they’d been nowhere near the shell explosions and secondly because of the contributions of this man ...