I mean war always has been a part of our life since the first civilizations was established. I’m sure “shellshock” wasn’t only caused by artilery shots.
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We started talking about shellshock in WW1 because that was the first war where nearly every soldier was close enough to experience nearly constant danger and exposure to artillery shells, which of course are loud and dangerous and highly traumatizing.
We’ve always known that war is hell and changes people. Ancient Assyrians recorded how warriors had a hard time reintegrating after service. Achilles falls into a stupor during the long passive years during the siege of Troy. Shakespeare describes a returned soldier having night terrors in Henry I.
In the civil war it was known as soldier’s heart because the soldiers developed anxiety, during railroad accidents they would say you got “railway Spine” to explain the anxiety and sleeplessness. They were more or less all looking to put a physical cause down to explain what we now call PTSD, but it wasn’t until the Vietnam War when we started looking at it as a mental health condition caused by exposure to stress that rewires a person’s behavior, rather than a physical injury that causes bad signals to be sent between body parts.
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