Hysterical Disorders of Wartime

This book was first published by Macmillan, London, in 1918. The version we have in the Collection is the modern public domain. There is a Preface by Sir Edward Farquhar Buzzard, Bt, who was a prominent British physician of the time, and also Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford. The book is written by a practitioner whose beliefs and methods have been largely discredited. Yealland did not consider shell shock an illness, and believed that men who showed such symptoms displayed a lack of discipline or sense of duty. He practised a form of therapy based on punishment. He gained a reputation for curing and sending his patients back to the trenches quickly. There is a very good, if horrifying, description of Yealland's procedures in Pat Barker's novel "Regeneration". (It's in the Collection!).