BBC Radio 4 – Home Front – The shell shock epidemic of WW1
For my weekly blog post I chose this article written by the BBC. It is a very useful article for my digital project. The article mentions that the British military believed that shell shock was caused by a shaking of the brain. It is interesting to see how they explained the causes of shell shock medically. The article also has an interesting discussion about the need of the term shell shock to put a name on the problem. People had many problems with the term but it stuck despite attempts to change it to things like “air raid shock”. But perhaps the most intriguing part of the article states that 40% of the soldiers at Verdun experienced shell shock. This statistic shows the vast impact of war trauma on soldiers.
