ABSTRACT
The issue of shell shock dominated military psychiatry during World War One. Although the term was first employed in a medical publication by Myers in February 1915, he admitted that it was not of his making (Myers, 1915; Myers, 1940). It appears to have arisen in popular usage and rapidly caught popular imagination and has continued to have a lasting appeal (Leese, 2002). By 1916, the British army was suffering from an epidemic of shell shock and, with losses incurred on the Somme, faced a manpower crisis. Desperate measures were introduced by the military authorities both to treat and to prevent cases. One of the key interventions, so-called ‘forward psychiatry’, involved setting up specialist units about ten miles from the trenches; treatment relied on three principles: Proximity of treatment to the battlefield, immediacy of response and the expectation of recovery. Subsequently given the acronym ‘PIE’, the method became the standard intervention for what was later termed combat stress reaction.
