Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930

Trauma--the psychological consequences of wars, accidents and abuse--has become the subject of heated debate among doctors, psychologists, and lay critics (and activists) in recent years. The essays in this book trace the origins of these debates in medicine and culture in modern Europe and America. They cover medical and cultural aspects of experiences understood to be "traumatic" from rail and factory accidents in the later nineteenth century through the First World War and its aftermath.