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attention.”
17
The psychic effect of earthquakes could thus be reduced to that
of “the sudden, completely unmediated onset of the stimulus, which pro-
duces a strong fright and as such represents the immediate cause of the ill-
ness.”
18
in the end, Phleps never clearly drew the line between the physical
and psychic impacts of earthquakes. But this did not detract from the power
of his conclusion: “As far as the development of psychoses after earthquakes
is concerned, it is probably sufficient to point to the uniquely powerful
natural disaster,
which unsettles every party more or less profoundly.
”
19
in an
earthquake's wake, no one, male or female, was immune to hysteria.
Not everyone, however, was convinced by the diagnosis of traumatic
shock. The anti-Nazi criminologist Hans von Hentig, for one, believed that
the ills of earthquake victims had a far more complex etiology. Hentig,
who had studied with the renowned psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin before the
war, suspected that the pathways by which earthquakes affected human
health were both environmental and psychic. He thus fused the nineteenth-
century tradition of medical geography with the new psychiatric findings.
He felt that the environmental dimensions of human health had been ob-
scured by the successes of modern bacteriology. The human effects of earth-
quakes allowed one “to glimpse an intermediate level between the bodily
and the mental.”
20
They therefore could not be deduced from even the most
sophisticated mechanical devices: “The cause must be a different form of en-
ergy than the 'shock.' The experiences of seismo-pathology permit no other
interpretation. While the most sensitive horizontal pendulums have always
lured us farther into a one-sided analysis of the mechanical components of
the phenomenon, the reagent of the living organism, above all of the ner-
vous system, opens surprising perspectives for the earthquake researcher as
well as for the psychiatrist.”
21
in an age when seismology was increasingly
confined to geophysical observatories, Hentig recalled how much could still
be learned from the human seismograph.
Earthquakes thus deserve a place in the history of trauma psychiatry.
They were, in fact, an ideal site for investigations of shock. When technolo-
gies went awry, it was always possible that people would claim injury in
order to win insurance compensation. Earthquakes, on the other hand,
were legally “acts of God.” Victims had no financial incentive to simulate a
malady, and the symptoms of shock were therefore all the more irrefutable.
in fact, earthquakes often provided a point of reference for early industrial
accidents. in her study of literary prefigurations of the concept of shock, Jill
Matus notes, “shock in the texts i have been quoting is likened to tremor
and earthquake, a violent disruption, a clash, or physical upheaval.”
22
One
of the earliest instances Matus cites is a railway crash in Charles Dickens's
