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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 Jenny Bourne Taylor (bio) Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, edited by Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner; pp. xix + 316. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, £45.00, $65.00. Shifting between the literal and the metaphorical and bringing together individual and collective history, "trauma" has become part of everyday language, easily debased by over- exposure, while remaining a contentious term whose meaning is bound up with the medical and legal contests it has generated. The essays in Traumatic Pasts trace the concept's complex social and political histories in a range of comparative Western settings, from the impact of mass forms of transport and factory production to the First World War. They do not attempt to establish a continuous genealogy of an identifiable condition so much as to specify the multiple points of connection and slippage between different descriptive terms—spinal concussion, railway spine, nostalgia, neurasthenia, traumatic hysteria, traumatic neurosis—through a series of case studies which explore how these conditions were discussed by scientific establishments, how they became the focus of government policy and social legislation, how they were interpreted and contested by specific social groups and overdetermined by precise ideological interests. The collection opens with the railway accident—that potent emblem of modernity and mobility that affects all classes, that is beyond the victims' control and strikes apparently by chance. Ralph Harrington and Eric Caplan describe how "railway spine" [End Page 342] contributed to a fundamental shift in the understanding of the relationship between soma and psyche in Britain and America in the late nineteenth century, within the precise medico-legal context of controversies about accountability and compensation. Harrington explores how the discussion about railway spine from the early 1860s took place within a hermeneutics of suspicion, as company doctors sought to establish that injuries existing "in the mind" could not be laid at employers' doors. In response, John Erichsen, whose experience of railway accidents sprang from his own role as an expert witness in compensation claims, stressed the delayed and nonspecific aspects of trauma in On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System in 1866. Erichsen's concept of railway spine remained a somatic one; but in arguing that the extreme violence of the railway accident blurred the boundary between the physical event and the delayed psychological response, he paved the way for an analysis of how psychic shock produces physical symptoms—an analysis that would be developed in England by Fredreric Clark, John Furneaux Jordan, and above all Herbert Page, a railway company surgeon who claimed that fear, rather than direct injury to the spine, produced the symptoms of trauma. Both Harrington and Caplan discuss the implications of Page's arguments, first developed in response to Erichsen's somaticism. Caplan gives an overview of the main international figures—Page, Jean-Martin Charcot, Hermann Oppenheim—who contributed to the idea of psychological trauma in America. This development culminated in the formation of the National Association of Railway Surgeons in 1888, which returned the issue of railway spine back to the legal stage. Compensation and insurance, contained in the "private" arena of capitalist enterprise in England and America, reenters the public sphere in the two essays on work accidents and trauma in the early welfare state in late nineteenth-century Germany. Wolfgang Schaffner and Greg Eghigian both argue that legislation making insurance the centre of social policy, together with new medico-legal definitions of accidents in the 1880s, shaped the state within a "discourse of trauma" that embedded the legacy of debates on railway spine in the national economy and consciousness. Oppenheim—who makes numerous appearances throughout the collection—developed the concept of "traumatic neurosis" as a precise clinical condition, in which "the major part is played by the psychic" (qtd. in Micale 83). This diagnosis gave rise to charges of simulation when applied in the legal domain and set at the heart of social policy the vexed question, one that Sigmund Freud would return to, of how to draw a boundary between conscious and unconscious mimicry. Both Schaffner and Eghigian, often covering...