ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that modern warfare has exercised a significant influence on the evolution of psychiatry in the twentieth century. Stone, for example, argued that the identification of shell shock and attempts to treat the disorder were ‘an important and dynamic episode in the development of psychological medicine in Britain’ in that they brought Freudian concepts of neurosis into ‘the mainstream of mental medicine and economic life and set psychiatry’s field of practice squarely within the social fabric of industrial society’ (Stone, 1985, pp. 265-266). Merskey concluded from his study of shell shock that ‘the maturation of psychiatry occurred in the course of World War One; it then became a speciality with potential for the community’. Prominent figures like ‘T.A.Ross, D.K.Henderson and Millais Culpin’, he added, ‘all received an impetus to work outside the psychiatric hospitals from their own wartime experience’ (Merskey, 1991, p. 261). Similarly, Showalter (1987) argued that it was the war that finally made doctors accept that males, as distinct from ‘hysterical’ females, also had a psychic dimension.
