Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Background and purpose
- 2 Historical perspective
- 3 Methods and ethics
- 4 Current theory: post-traumatic stress disorder
- 5 Approaches to understanding trauma
- 6 Positive outcomes of traumatic experiences
- 7 Memory and history
- 8 Personal narrative and social discourse
- 9 Illustrating narrative as a scientific technique: the role of social support
- 10 Ageing, trauma and memory
- 11 Literature and trauma
- 12 Memorialisation and commemoration
- 13 Battlefield tours
- 14 Conclusions and future directions
- References
- Index
1 - Background and purpose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Background and purpose
- 2 Historical perspective
- 3 Methods and ethics
- 4 Current theory: post-traumatic stress disorder
- 5 Approaches to understanding trauma
- 6 Positive outcomes of traumatic experiences
- 7 Memory and history
- 8 Personal narrative and social discourse
- 9 Illustrating narrative as a scientific technique: the role of social support
- 10 Ageing, trauma and memory
- 11 Literature and trauma
- 12 Memorialisation and commemoration
- 13 Battlefield tours
- 14 Conclusions and future directions
- References
- Index
Summary
I was recently asked to write about the health consequences of war (Hunt, 2008). I started by trying to trace the number of casualties in the wars of the twentieth century, but quickly gave up trying to obtain any sort of accurate account; records were often not kept, or were lost during wars, were deliberately manipulated by the winners or by the losers, or the records are still (presumably) in secret files. I then tried counting the number of wars during the century; this too became very difficult, as so many of them are relatively minor in terms of casualties (unless you are a participant). In the end I gave up trying to look at every war. I ended up focusing on those wars where there were more than 1 million dead. Accounting for the wounded and sick, and those with psychological problems, these are wars with possibly 5 million casualties – and then there is the impact on surviving family members and friends. The twentieth century had around 26 such wars – if we count episodes such as Stalin's campaign against the Kulaks and Chairman Mao's killing of the Chinese, which were not strictly wars, but were internal actions that still led to millions of deaths. On the basis of the figures available, I calculated that, overall, around 240 million people (give or take 50 million) had died as a result of these large wars in the twentieth century – not counting the victims of smaller wars.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Memory, War and Trauma , pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010