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Wartime Psychiatry is a compendium, sponsored by the National Association for Mental Health, of the international literature on psychiatry in the Second World War, covering a vast range of topics and providing excellent summaries of more than one thousand articles and books that appeared chiefly between 1940 and 1948. It is more than an invaluable reference book. The grouping of the material and the introductions to each section, written by the editors, unify the whole and place each problem in a suitable context.
The wartime psychiatrists wrestled with many problems, military as well as medical. As they found solutions, which varied and yet were increasingly in general agreement, they progressed from a clinical to a broadly social orientation that fulfilled the needs of a nation in crisis. At first confronted with discrete and practical assignments—the screening of prospective inductees; the organization of psychiatric services within the armed forces; the prophylaxis, diagnosis, and disposition of combat neuroses; and eventually the rehabilitation of veterans—psychiatry was forced to learn basic principles of psychodynamics on the battlefield, so to speak, distinguishing in this way between many academic theories and really vital facts.
Twelve percent of the Americans examined for military service were rejected for neuropsychiatric reasons. The British rejected only two percent, yet their psychiatric casualties were no greater than our own. The reason may, as William Menninger suggests, have been the more flexible British system of placement, which permits