[64] Cf. E. Régis, “Les Troubles Psychiques et Neuro-Psychiques de la Guerre,” Presse Médicale, 23, p. 177, May 27th, 1915.
[65] This term is derived from the Greek word for the womb. Hysteria was once thought to be due to the wanderings of the uterus about the body. The term well deserves its place beside that other ornament of psychological medicine—the word “lunacy.”
[66] The Diagnosis of Nervous Diseases, 3rd Edition, London, 1911, p. 355.
[67] Italics ours.
[68] p. 355.
[69] This was seen repeatedly in the treatment of the relatively uneducated soldiers who had become slightly neurasthenic as a result of the war, especially of those whose life had been spent in open-air manual work, or in the strict and healthy routine of the regular army. They complained of emotional irritability, minor lapses of memory such as the forgetting of relatively unimportant names or of errands, disturbed sleep, soon “getting fed up” with their amusements (e.g., “jig-saws,” or billiards for hours every day, month after month in a converted schoolroom or outhouse!). Not only did these phenomena disturb them, but in a great many cases they seemed to prove to these unfortunate men that they were insane, or rapidly becoming so. They would anxiously ask such questions as, “What is it that makes me so irritable at a slight noise, or at being brushed against by another patient? I used not to be like that.” Their conduct was also regarded as unusual by their companions. Now would not the head of a business firm, an over-worked medical man, a university professor or an army officer in a position of responsibility, confidently expect to be allowed ex-officio a certain number of these eccentricities without being called “diseased?” But let him drop the privileges and shelter of his rank, live for a few weeks as a private in a barracks with a number of high-spirited and thoroughly healthy soldiers and his behaviour might certainly be considered by them to be queer, if nothing worse.
[70] Reform of this state of affairs is urgently needed. The matter is of such fundamental and far-reaching importance that we have devoted part of the next chapter to the further consideration of its bearings.
[71] “Tough-minded,” “matter-mongers,” modern writers have called this type, contrasting it with that of the “tender-minded,” “reason-mongers.”
[72] Of a brilliant teacher of physiology, one who was himself intensely interested in the sciences bordering on his own subject, it was related that when, in lecturing upon the functions of the nervous system in man, he approached difficult problems, he used to say, “But that is a matter for the psychologist.” Whereupon the class heaved a sigh of relief and prepared to take notes upon the next subject.
[73] “... strong electric shocks, cold douches, and other decorous substitutes for a sound birching.” W. McDougall, Psychology, London, 1912.