From Shock to Schreck: Psychiatrists, Telephone Operators and Traumatic Neurosis in Germany, 1900—26

Abstract

In the summer of 1911, Fraulein Theodora F., a telephone operator in Gottingen, had an accident at work caused by what she described as an 'electric shock in the left ear'. She was unable to work for almost two months. Six months after returning to her job, she had a second accident, which she described as being caused by 'crackling in the receiver as a result of atmospheric electricity'. As a result of this second 'nervous shock', Fraulein F. entered a sanatorium for a two-month stay paid for by the German accident insurance system. She was diagnosed as suffering from 'general nervous exhaustion of a hysterical character resulting from accident'.1 The case of Theodora F. was not unusual. During the first decades of the twentieth century, many of the women who staffed Germany's telephone exchanges reported occurrences similar to hers. These women became a familiar sight in doctors' consulting rooms and clinics, routinely presenting themselves with the complaint: 'I received an electric shock (Ich babe Strom bekommen).'2 This article places the emergence of this new species of technological malady within the context of contemporaneous debates in Germany about work, social insurance, gender, and the accidents, shocks and afflictions of industrial society. It examines the way in which the disease-picture surrounding this malady became the site of medical and legal conflicts of interpretation that cast doubt on the legitimacy of this picture and, ultimately, recast the medical paradigm underlying it in a way that made operators themselves responsible for their illnesses. Focusing on interactions between telephone operators and psychiatrists, this article connects these developments with the construction and dismantling of the clinical entity known as 'traumatic neurosis' (precursor of today's post-traumatic stress disorder). First identified in 1889 as a syndrome whose diagnosis entitled patients to insurance benefits, traumatic (or accident) neurosis spread to almost epidemic proportions through German society, until being legislated out of existence in 1926. Conceived originally as a quintessential malady of technological modernity, it was ultimately reduced to a pseudo-illness, a by-product of acci