Shell Shock in France 1914-1918. Based on a War Diary Kept by Charles S. Myers, C.B.E., F.R.S. SIGNED BY CHARLES S. MYERS.

MYERS, Charles S. [Samuel]

Published by Cambridge: At the University Press, 1940.

About this Item

xi, 146 pp. Original cloth. Stains on spine. Front cover very rubbed. Bubbling in front pastedown. Binding is warped. Half-title leaf browned, as is the verso of the leaf preceding the rear flyleaf. Maybe this copy is only "Fair" but I will say "Good". The inscription is what makes this a desirable copy. NOTE ABOUT PHOTOS: ABE allows only five photos. I can send more photos showing the state of the binding, upon request. First Edition. SIGNED BY CHARLES S. MYERS: "To K. O. Newman/ with the warm regards of/ Charles S. Myers/ March 29 1942." Although Myers did not claim to have invented the term "shell shock", he was the first to use it in a medical publication, and it is from Myers's publication that it became a technical term. His first paper on the subject was published in The Lancet in 1915, "A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock. Being an Account of Three Cases of Loss of Memory, Vision, Smell, and Taste, Admitted into the Duchess of Westminster's War Hospital, Le Touquet". Myers used the term "shell shock" in his title and in the next-to-the-last paragraph where he added a hyphen, "shell-shock". "The first recorded use of the term 'shell shock' was in an article published in the Lancet in February 1915 by the academic psychologist Charles Myers (1873-1946), then attached to a volunteer medical unit in France. This was not the first account of nervous and mental breakdown in soldiers published in the war, but 'shell shock' was something new: previous reports had described symptoms under a variety of different headings (including simply 'shock,' a familiar category in prewar medicine). 'Shell shock' was not Myers' neologism, although he later commented that he must have been 'one of the first' to employ it. It may have originated among the fighting troops, but its exact provenance will never be known. It was Myers, however, who gave shell shock official existence in medical discourse, from whence it rapidly escaped into public ownership" (Tracey Loughran, "Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and Its Histories", Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 67, no. 1, January 2012, p. 105).

Seller Inventory # 17464

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Shell Shock in France 1914-1918. Based on a War Diary Kept by Charles S. Myers, C.B.E., F.R.S. SIGNED BY CHARLES S. MYERS.
• Publisher: Cambridge: At the University Press, 1940.
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)