Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Author's note on usage
- List of maps and figures
- List of tables
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 THE OTTOMAN GREAT WAR AND CAPTIVITY IN RUSSIA AND EGYPT
- 2 IMAGINING COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY IN RUSSIA AND EGYPT: A COMPARISON
- 3 SAVIOUR SONS OF THE NATION: INSIDE THE PRISONERS' MINDS
- 4 PRISONERS AS DISEASE CARRIERS: CASES OF PELLAGRA AND TRACHOMA
- 5 WAR NEUROSES AND PRISONERS OF WAR: WARTIME NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AND THE POLITICS OF MEDICAL INTERPRETATION
- 6 DEGENERATIONIST PATHWAY TO EUGENICS: NEUROPSYCHIATRY, SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND ANXIETIES OVER NATIONAL HEALTH
- EPILOGUE: THE SEARCH FOR A USEABLE PAST: PRISONERS OF WAR, THE OTTOMAN GREAT WAR AND TURKISH NATIONALISM
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - WAR NEUROSES AND PRISONERS OF WAR: WARTIME NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AND THE POLITICS OF MEDICAL INTERPRETATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Author's note on usage
- List of maps and figures
- List of tables
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 THE OTTOMAN GREAT WAR AND CAPTIVITY IN RUSSIA AND EGYPT
- 2 IMAGINING COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY IN RUSSIA AND EGYPT: A COMPARISON
- 3 SAVIOUR SONS OF THE NATION: INSIDE THE PRISONERS' MINDS
- 4 PRISONERS AS DISEASE CARRIERS: CASES OF PELLAGRA AND TRACHOMA
- 5 WAR NEUROSES AND PRISONERS OF WAR: WARTIME NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AND THE POLITICS OF MEDICAL INTERPRETATION
- 6 DEGENERATIONIST PATHWAY TO EUGENICS: NEUROPSYCHIATRY, SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND ANXIETIES OVER NATIONAL HEALTH
- EPILOGUE: THE SEARCH FOR A USEABLE PAST: PRISONERS OF WAR, THE OTTOMAN GREAT WAR AND TURKISH NATIONALISM
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a country side in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a force-field of destructive currents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 84They said war is like a bath of steel, those who enter it would be steel-like. In reality, the opposite is the truth.
Dr Şükrü Hazım Tiner, Eugenik Bahsine Umumi Bir Bakış, p. 30While primarily concerned with prisoners of war, this study must also examine the medical discourse concerning Ottoman soldiers who suffered nervous breakdowns at the front, or those who military-medical authorities accused of malingering. During the war, when medical professionals examined and diagnosed Ottoman soldiers who claimed to have suffered a nervous breakdown, or war neurosis, they frequently used prisoners of war as a point of comparison. Neuropsychiatrists initially insisted that since they did not see war neurosis and related disorders among prisoners of war, that non-prisoners' claims to be suffering from war-related disorders were false. Therefore, the doctors perceived them as malingering or feigning illness. This chapter argues that the connection between prisoners and non-prisoners was already evident in the socio-medical discourse of neuro-psychiatrists both in the Ottoman Empire and Europe. However, about a decade after the end of the war, the neuro-psychiatrists retroactively diagnosed the former prisoners with some of the same mental disorders as those non-prisoners they had diagnosed during the war.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Healing the NationPrisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914-1939, pp. 171 - 207Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013