How shell shock led to “dottyville”
It was the British psychologist Charles /yers who first coined the term nshell shock’, in 1915, at the height of the First World War.
Hysteria had previously been understood as a female malady now shell shock was framed as a ‘male hysteria’, implying a lack of masculine stoicism. Given that soldiers were expected to adhere to masculine ideals of bravery and resilience, shell shock – of which 80,000 cases were recorded in the First World War – was not always treated with sympathy. For example, while he was working at London’s National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Dr Lewis Yealland applied electric shocks to men with mutism until they started to speak again.
There was a class dynamic in the symptoms and the treatment of shell shock, mirroring the structure of prewar society and its military hierarchies. Privates allegedly tended to exhibit more psychosomatic symptoms than oʛcers, for eZample mutism or bodily contortions. Mutism may have been linked to the psychological pressures of constantly following orders without being able to speak your mind or articulate fears.
5ome shell shock sufferers were treated humanely at institutions like the famous Craiglockhart in Scotland. Among them was the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, who referred to Craiglockhart as “dottyville”, and spoke fondly of the place and his close relationship with his therapist W*R Rivers However, Sassoon also wrote about the horror of shell shock: “By night each man was back in his doomed sector of horrorstricken front line, where the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the livid faces of the dead. No doctor could save him then, when he became the lonely victim of his dream disasters and delusions.”
Wilfred Owen was also a patient at Craiglockhart, and his treatment, and friendship with Sassoon, were catalysts for him to write his famous poetry. In fact it was in the hospital’s magazine, The Hydra, that Owen produced some of his most deeply haunting pieces – ones that helped shape our cultural memory of the conflict