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The history of Freud's life continues to sustain a vivified interest, and any episode in it attracts quick attention. Such is the case in the present instance, although the material event involved hardly warrants so massive a volume, and upon the reading one is left with the belief that the title is misleading since the book does not deal mainly with Freud's testimony.
The incident involving Freud arose at the end of World War I. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had paid with enormous hardship, deprivation and suffering for the privilege of being dismembered and eviscerated. So far as this reviewer could determine in conversations with Austrians they still feel the outcome of World War I more keenly than that of World War II. As a result outcries arose from various quarters to investigate and punish those responsible for the calamity, especially where dereliction of military duty was involved. The book deals with an incident in which a soldier complained to the investigating commission about his treatment, for an injury sustained in combat at the hands of the renowned Wagner von Jauregg of the University of Vienna.
From the evidence adduced in the book, this reviewer agrees with the author that the patient, a lieutenant named Kauders, had sustained an organic brain injury, and that Wagner-Jauregg had erred in treating the patient as a case of war neurosis. The treatment, described as barbaric, involved prolonged solitary confinement, the use of drugs with disagreeable effects such as apomorphine, and the administration of electric currents evaluated by the patient, but not by the doctors, as painful. “Wagner-Jauregg was mistaken from both a psychiatric and a neurological point of view” (p. 219).
Freud's role in the proceedings was limited to appearing for a few hours before the commission investigating Wagner and his clinic, and in providing some verbal testimony and a short written opinion. Freud himself either forgot to include his written statement in his collected writi