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Nowadays, there is a profusion of important books on military psychiatry: Barham, on the British experience of World War I; on the German equivalent, Lerner's (2003) Hysterical Men, War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930; Blindfold And Alone by Hughes-Wilson and Corns (2005), a story of military executions in World War I; finally the new history of military psychiatry by Jones and Wessley (2005), Shellshock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War.
Barham's Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War is a fascinating book, essential reading for understanding the history of British psychiatry in the twentieth century. Barham writes passionately; he shows both progress and obstruction in acceptance, understanding and treatment of the psychological stresses experienced as soldiers from their induction into the military machine to the battlefield. Their experiences are vividly portrayed through numerous case-histories, letters from the soldiers to and from their families.
Barham situates his text in the changing context of the social situation and development at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The social order is changing, the dominant hierarchies are slowly and reluctantly giving way to the rising aspirations of the working classes and the new professionals. The enormously enlarged army brought in men who regarded themselves not simply as soldiers, but as citizen soldiers, therefore entitled to treatment appropriate for citizens, not simply to be treated as military fodder. Throughout the book, Barham constantly illustrates the rigid mentality of the military class and the rigid mentality of the civil service bureaucracy that had to meet the demands for pensions and for more appropriate treatment of the psychiatric casualties of war than admission to mental hospitals as ‘lunatics’. Only in 1917 did the nomenclature change from such terms as ‘lunatics’ or ‘idiots’, which indicated permanent states of d