Shell-shock and other neuropsychiatric problems

Mott had a case which had been mute more than six months, unable to whistle, phonate in coughing, or blow out a candle, though heard to shout in his sleep: This patient recovered his speech when pitched out of a punt on New Year’s Eve. The condition was in one sense physical enough, as the X-ray showed that the man’s diaphragm hardly moved even with the greatest effort. Mott regarded the inhibition of the breathing movements, especially the phonation, as caused by fear. Mott speaks of a case that recovered on being told by a comrade that he had talked in his sleep. The man was so astonished by this statement that he said, “I don’t believe it.” Other instances of cure under quasi natural conditions are related by Mott: In the presence of a functional mute, Mott speaks loudly to the patient’s sister so that the patient may hear: “This man must be kept on a No. 1 diet, and when he can ask loud enough for you to hear, he can have a bottle of stout and a mutton-chop.” Several mutes are reported to have gotten well the next day under this treatment.

These effects shade imperceptibly over into the manifestly suggestive, and probably no sharp line can be drawn between the effects of medical suggestion, non-medical heterosuggestion, and even autosuggestion. Adrian and Yealland rather decry the Micawber line of waiting for something to turn up. Zeehandelaar, a Dutch professor, studied Berlin methods (Lewandowsky), and found numerous cases (both of mutism and of deafness, paralyses, contractures, and tremors) lying about without special treatment. According to this observer, the expectant treatment was sometimes successful, and sometimes not; if unsuccessful, the soldier was sent home, and re-examined a year later; whereupon he might be found to have profited by this long waiting and to have gotten well enough to return to army duty.