Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
s i x
The Moment of Danger
in 1917 an American seismologist casually remarked that the psychological
effects of earthquakes would form “an interesting thesis subject for some
graduate student of psychology.”
1
in fact, at a time when scientists were de-
vising new means of measuring human emotions in the laboratory,
2
earth-
quakes had already drawn the science of fear into the field. The emerging
disciplines of trauma psychiatry and criminology mined the testimony of
earthquake victims for clues to managing the human aftermath of disas-
ter. These episodes have been overshadowed in the history of the human
sciences by military and industrial catastrophes. But natural disasters also
played a role in shaping a modern understanding of the psyche and its de-
fenses. The industrialized mind still recognized its own vulnerability to the
natural world.
From Vertigo to Shock
in the late eighteenth century, witnesses to earthquakes were often diag-
nosed with vertigo, a condition of particular interest to eighteenth-century
physicians and philosophers. As a disorder that did not belong exclusively
to the mind or body, vertigo spoke to the Enlightenment fascination with
the relationship between reason and sensibility.
3
Vertigo continued to fas-
cinate the romantics because it blurred the distinction between the passive
and active mind, between sensation and imagination.
4
When earthquake
investigators reported cases of vertigo in this period, they were making a
diagnosis at once physical and psychological. They did not fret over the
relative contribution of reality and imagination, as later researchers would.
They simply accepted that vertigo (and associated symptoms like nausea)
were typical reactions to tremors, particularly where shaking was too weak
