War Neuroses and Arthur Hurst: a Pioneering Medical Film Or Misleading Propaganda

War, empire and the psychological subject

War Neuroses and Arthur Hurst: a pioneering medical film or misleading propaganda

This paper will explore the historical context of the 24-minute film made by Major Arthur Hurst in 1917-18 entitled ‘War Neuroses’. Funded by the Medical Research Committee, Hurst filmed shell-shock patients invalided from France with intractable movement disorders. Using Pathé cameramen, he recorded individuals before and after treatment at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley and on programs of occupational therapy at Seale Hayne in Devon. As one of the earliest UK medical films, Hurst drew inspiration from both the official documentary of the ‘Battle of the Somme’ and films made in 1915-16 by French Army neurologists. Of particular importance was the film made by Major Clovis Vincent of ‘torpillage’ at the Tours Neurological Centre. Although initially motivated to make use of a novel medium to illustrate lectures, Hurst was alert the wider appeal of film and saw an opportunity to position himself in the post-war medical hierarchy. Claims made of ‘cures’ in the film and associated publications were challenged in journals by other doctors treating shell shock. Analysis shows that some ‘before treatment’ shots were re-enacted and evidence discovered in war pension files suggests that patients treated by Hurst relapsed after discharge. In the post-war period, clinicians admitted that they used trickery to treat difficult cases and took advantage of changes in military regulations to address functional symptoms. In particular, doctors emphasized that return to the front-line was unlikely and in 1918 had been encouraged to discharge soldiers to civilian employment. Nevertheless, the message conveyed in the film, that chronic cases could be treated in a single session, had a powerful resonance for ambitious or charismatic doctors and was repeated in World War Two. This multi-disciplinary paper explores how a film originally conceived by the MRC as an aid to teaching and research became caught up in the imperatives of war and rivalries between physicians.

Edgar Jones,

Professor of the History of Medicine and Psychiatry,

King’s Centre for Military Health Research,

King’s College London

‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’: The Influence of the Second World War on British Developmental Psychology

The aim of this paper is to examine the influence of the Second World War on theories of child development. Both during and immediately after the war the mental health of children, particularly young children, became an issue of prime importance, with experiences during the war, such as evacuation, offering new opportunities for research. For example Anna Freud set up the Hampstead War Nurseries for ‘bombed-out’ children in London. Together with Dorothy Burlingham, she published studies of the children and they stated that the nurseries had offered ‘excellent opportunities for detailed and unbroken observation of child-development’. Then, after the war, a group of orphans from the Theresienstadt concentration camp came into the care of Anna Freud’s colleagues at the Bulldogs Bank home providing a further opportunity after the war to observe even more extreme parental deprivation. Furthermore, in 1949 the British psychologist John Bowlby was commissioned to write the World Health Organization’s report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe. The result was Maternal Care and Mental Health published in 1951. His main conclusions, that ‘the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’ and that not to do so may have significant and irreversible mental health consequences, were both controversial and influential. In this paper I will argue that the war encouraged a new focus on children’s psychological development in the period from birth to five and the role of the mother within in this. The view that maternal care in infancy was crucial for the physical development of the child had long roots stretching back to the late-nineteenth century, with poor maternal care acknowledged to have a detrimental effect. However, what was new was that mere physical separation from the mother was now seen a pathogenic factor in its own right.

Dr Angela Davis

Centre for the History of Medicine

University of Warwick

Psychiatry in Italian Colonies

In recent years the question of colonial psychiatry has received a growing attention (Mahone & Vaughan 2007; Keller 2007; Benevelli 2009; Ernst & Muller 2010); the history of psychiatry and the history of colonialism have intertwined and a new subject has entered the field of historiography: it is the peculiar case of a new otherness – the lunatic in the colonies – bearing a double “difference”, in which an alterity of the “native” at large, is added to a more specific, mental alienity.

Situating my intellectual concern of research on the broad “discourse” of colonial sciences – a very coherent one, even if consisting of different disciplines (from anthropology to city planning, from sociology to biomedicine, from linguistics to cartography) and subaltern to a global imperialistic project that had to cover in a hegemonic way every aspect of social life – I will focus on the place occupied by psychiatric theories and practices in situation coloniale. In the colonial context psychiatric clinical and institutional apparatus, medical literature and protagonists of the field might be studied taking into exam on the one side the forms of the psychiatric discipline and on the other the forms of colonial governamentality.

My paper will deal with the articulation of these different and connected aspects in the not yet much investigated context of the Italian colonies. It will tackle the function and the functioning of the asylum in the colonies, in its relation with the “social policy” of colonial administrations; the process of theoretic and clinical elaboration and its incorporation into the broader colonial project; the trajectories of doctors and psychiatrists operating in the colonies, as symptomatic of links and exchanges between the metropolitan centre and the overseas “peripheries” and of a peripherical circulation of paradigms and experiences at the margins of the empires.

Marianna Scarfone is a Phd student at the University of Venice in co-tutelle with Paris. She has recently spent a semester at the University of Frankfurt, Cluster of excellence “Normative Orders”.

She received a M.A. in Contemporary History both from the University of Bologna and the University of Paris VII (double diplôme franco-italien) and an M.A. in Diplomacy and International Policy (Bologna).