To the British soldiers of the Great War who heard about it, 'shell shock' was uncanny, amusing and sad. To those who experienced it, the condition was shameful, unjustly stigmatized and life-changing. The first full-length study of the British 'shell shocked' soldiers of the Great War combines social and medical history to investigate the experience of psychological casualties on the Western Front, in hospitals, and through their postwar lives. It also investigates the condition's origin and consequences within British culture.

The British poets Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, and Siegfried Sassoon found themselves psychologically altered by what they experienced in the First World War. Owen was hospitalized in April 1917 for "shell shock" in Scotland, where he met Siegfried Sassoon in June of that year, hospitalized for the same affliction. Ivor Gurney found the war, ironically, to have been a place of relative stability within an otherwise tormented life; When he was wounded during the war's final year, his doctors observed signs of mental illness, which evolved into incapacitating psychosis by 1922. For each of these men--all poets before the war--poetry served as a way to inscribe continuity into their lives, enabling them to retaliate against the war's propensity to render the lives of the participants discontinuous. Poetry allowed them to return to the war through memory and imagination, and poetry helped them to bring themselves back from psychological breakdown to a state of stability, based upon a relationship to the war that their literary war enabled them to create and discover. This work investigates the ways in which the poetry of war functioned as a means for these three men to express the inexpressible and to extract value out of the experience of war. Bibliography and index are also included. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Royal Dutch/Shell is a multinational behemoth. Every four seconds of every day, 1,200 cars fill their tanks with petrol on Shell forecourts, while at airports around the world civil airliners are refuelled with Shell aviation spirit every ten seconds. The company has long been regarded as a world leader and a model for other corporations. That is, until January 2004.In a truly dramatic statement, the company told an incredulous world that estimates of Shell's reserves had been inflated by a staggering 3.9 billion barrels. It was the first of a series of admissions that brought into question Shell's reputation for rectitude and sent its share price tumbling. Shell Shock is an engrossing account which reveals details that have never been included in any company accounts. Prominent amongst these is the confirmation that one of the corporation's two 'founding fathers', Henri Deterding, was a passionate supporter of fascist dictators such as Gmez in Venezuela, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. Shell Shock then exposes the company's appalling environmental record, notably in Nigeria and the United States, and reveals the possible ecological consequences of current plans to extract oil from Sakhalin Island, off Russia's Pacific coast. As the company - threatened with multi-billion-dollar legal action in America and West Africa - struggles to recover from what amounts to self-immolation, this timely account of its history shows how an internal cultural revolution and an obsession with spin besmirched the company's good name, the quality that mattered most to Shell's founders.

The application of psychiatry to war and terrorism is highly topical and a source of intense media interest. Shell Shock to PTSD explores the central issues involved in maintaining the mental health of the armed forces and treating those who succumb to the intense stress of combat. Drawing on historical records, recent findings and interviews with veterans and psychiatrists, Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely present a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of military psychiatry. The psychological disorders suffered by servicemen and women from 1900 to the present are discussed and related to contemporary medical priorities and health concerns. This book provides a thought-provoking evaluation of the history and practice of military psychiatry, and places its findings in the context of advancing medical knowledge and the developing technology of warfare. It will be of interest to practicing military psychiatrists and those studying psychiatry, military history, war studies or medical history.