Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
shock has become fundamental to a modern understanding of the psyche,
its defenses and its vulnerabilities. Historians have constructed a history of
shock centered on industrial and military contexts, tracing the diagnosis
back to the early days of the railway. Railway travel was typically the middle
class's first encounter with industrial technology. Accidents occurred rela-
tively frequently; when they did, some victims complained of ills that were
similar to hysteria and could not be associated with any visible injury. These
patients were diagnosed with “railway spine.” At first, this was assumed to
be a form of fatigue due to the mechanical jolts and tremors that the railway
carriage inflicted on passengers. By the 1880s, though, this condition was
increasingly understood as psychic in origin, a form of “traumatic shock.”
8
in the First World War, shock became the principal framework for under-
standing the psychic effects of mechanized violence. Historians have thus
understood the concept of shock as a product of the military and techno-
logical contexts of industrialization.
Originally, however, shock also described a reaction to
nature's
violence.
several exemplary early cases were connected to natural disasters. Near-miss
lightning strikes, for instance, were to blame for several cases of male hyste-
ria treated by the famed Paris psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot. similarly, an
earthquake that produced moderate tremors in Nice in 1887 was the cause
of “nervous-pathological disorders.” Charcot treated a witness to this event
who “was preoccupied by the memory of the earthquake; at home, she was
haunted by this obsessive idea that nothing is solid and that perhaps the
ceiling is going to fall on her head.”
9
Charcot was quick to associate these
cases with other instances of “traumatic hysteria.” Crucial in this respect
was his observation that the hysterical condition could be triggered by a
wide variety of natural and man-made events. “Whether it is a matter of a
railway collision, of a nervous shock of any kind with or without trauma,
earthquake, carriage accident, or on the contrary of an intellectual or genital
overstimulation; of alcoholism, of saturnism; no matter, the nervous effect
always remains essentially the same.”
10
Charcot was led in this way to his
fateful conclusion: nervous illness could arise in the absence of a physical
or even neural injury, from a purely psychic wound.
11
Among cases of traumatic shock, earthquakes seemed to produce par-
ticularly intense emotions. An article in a journal cofounded by Charcot
observed: “There are no accidents that are accompanied by stronger emo-
tions, by more intense fright than those that are due to these great telluric
disturbances. Even if people have received no wound, not even a knock,
they seem no less absolutely unbalanced. One would say that the earth-
quake has produced in their brains a disorder analogous to the disorder it
