Book Review: The Disabled Soldier
Dec. 5th, 2020 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI have continued my glorious journey about World War I amputations with Douglas C. McMurtie's The Disabled Soldier, which was published in 1919 and offers loads of wonderful detail about the various training programs for disabled soldiers set up by countries involved in the conflict - not only the Allies but also Germany and (briefly) Hungary.
A smattering of facts from the book:
- prospects are better for leg amputees, who can do just about any work as long as they'll be seated at least one-half of the time (more than that is probably better); arm amputees often end up turning to office trades (bookkeeping, stenography, etc)
- he mentions piano tuning and massage as employments particularly well-suited to the blind. Blinded soldiers trained as masseurs often worked in army hospitals.
- he also mentions, in passing, a fencing course for the blind that became very popular at a French hospital. I just thought this was cool.
- World War I marked a change from a comparatively passive form of physical therapy (massage, manipulation of the patient's limbs by medical professionals) to the patient's active involvement in the therapy. McMurtrie is enthusiastic about this change and waxes particularly enthusiastic about the wonders of occupational therapy, which he prescribes for basically every recovering wounded man, including shell shock cases: "better than anything else is some light interesting work. Almost any kind of work will serve the purpose if it is not too fatiguing or so monotonous that it becomes mechanical... After a few weeks or even days of some congenial occupation, men begin to take a new interest in life. Their eyes brighten; their limbs stop trembling; they are no longer racked by dreams. With the awakening of their interest their will and initiative are also aroused, and their cure then is not far off."
- there's a whole chapter about shell shock, in which he takes some pains to explain to the reader that shell shock is “not necessarily caused by the concussion of high explosives with the accompanying noise and horrid sights – the psychic trauma of battle – but is as often brought on by the physical and emotional strains the soldier has to bear. Great fatigue, lack of sleep, cold, hunger, mud, and filth wear a man down to the breaking point. Then fear begins to clutch at him, and worse, the fear of being afraid. He struggles with his fear and conquers it, but each victory is at the cost of nervous energy. He suppresses all expression of his emotions and cultivates a soldierly indifference to the loss of comrades and the ghastly incidents of war, but the suppressed feelings wait their chance to gain the upper hand.”
(I've heard the "people thought shell shock was caused by the concussive blasts of shells!" theory before; apparently this had popular currency, but it was already out medically by 1919. McMurtrie is clear that it's a nervous disease, a "war psychoneurosis.")
- McMurtrie seems cheerier about the prospects of the shell-shocked than you might expect. The patients who REALLY worry him are the tuberculous, who are also the most numerous single casualty classification: 12% of British casualties were discharged because of tuberculosis. Basically, the conditions necessary to maintain health in the tubercular patient (fresh air and sunlight) seem to be at odds with most industrial employment (which takes place indoors, in poorly ventilated rooms, in air that is hot or dusty or steamy or smoky or basically anything but fresh). McMurtrie tries to retain his upbeat tone, but it's clear that he foresees difficulty in finding these chaps employment that won't kill them.
- Aside from the tuberculous, however, McMurtrie thinks that most disabled soldiers can become productive and happy members of society if the public will only let them: “Successful crippled and blind men unanimously testify that the handicap of public opinion is a greater obstacle than amputation of limb or loss of sight.”
(He is perhaps more optimistic that the public opinion might be changed than turned out to be warranted by subsequent facts.)
I was also DELIGHTED to find that the book contains ads for other books that might interest the reader, including The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me, which is about "Two ‘short, fat, bald, middle-aged, inland Americans’ cross over to France with commissions from the Red Cross." This may be the only hilarious World War I memoir in existence and I instantly repaired to Gutenberg.org to see if they had it, and discovered not only that they DO, but that there's an entire section heading for World War I memoirs, of which there are MANY, including one by E. W. Hornung (!!!!) who wrote the Raffles series.
Unfortunately for me, the amputee memoir does not seem to have been a genre yet after the Great War. It would have been so useful to have a memoir by, say, a double leg amputee, preferably with lots of interesting detail about, for instance, when the hell electric wheelchairs were invented, because this seems to be unclear. I discovered Sir Benn Jack Brunel Cohen, a British MP who lost both legs above the knee in the Battle of Ypres and, according to Wikipedia, used an electric wheelchair thereafter, although also quoth Wikipedia electric wheelchairs were not invented until the 1930s, even though there's a character in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (first published in 1928) who has an electric wheelchair.
(However, as you can see in this Youtube video, Amputees Learn to Use Artificial Limbs, manual self-propelled wheelchairs were already a thing during World War I: there are a couple guys propelling themselves in the wheelchair race at the beginning of the video.)
A smattering of facts from the book:
- prospects are better for leg amputees, who can do just about any work as long as they'll be seated at least one-half of the time (more than that is probably better); arm amputees often end up turning to office trades (bookkeeping, stenography, etc)
- he mentions piano tuning and massage as employments particularly well-suited to the blind. Blinded soldiers trained as masseurs often worked in army hospitals.
- he also mentions, in passing, a fencing course for the blind that became very popular at a French hospital. I just thought this was cool.
- World War I marked a change from a comparatively passive form of physical therapy (massage, manipulation of the patient's limbs by medical professionals) to the patient's active involvement in the therapy. McMurtrie is enthusiastic about this change and waxes particularly enthusiastic about the wonders of occupational therapy, which he prescribes for basically every recovering wounded man, including shell shock cases: "better than anything else is some light interesting work. Almost any kind of work will serve the purpose if it is not too fatiguing or so monotonous that it becomes mechanical... After a few weeks or even days of some congenial occupation, men begin to take a new interest in life. Their eyes brighten; their limbs stop trembling; they are no longer racked by dreams. With the awakening of their interest their will and initiative are also aroused, and their cure then is not far off."
- there's a whole chapter about shell shock, in which he takes some pains to explain to the reader that shell shock is “not necessarily caused by the concussion of high explosives with the accompanying noise and horrid sights – the psychic trauma of battle – but is as often brought on by the physical and emotional strains the soldier has to bear. Great fatigue, lack of sleep, cold, hunger, mud, and filth wear a man down to the breaking point. Then fear begins to clutch at him, and worse, the fear of being afraid. He struggles with his fear and conquers it, but each victory is at the cost of nervous energy. He suppresses all expression of his emotions and cultivates a soldierly indifference to the loss of comrades and the ghastly incidents of war, but the suppressed feelings wait their chance to gain the upper hand.”
(I've heard the "people thought shell shock was caused by the concussive blasts of shells!" theory before; apparently this had popular currency, but it was already out medically by 1919. McMurtrie is clear that it's a nervous disease, a "war psychoneurosis.")
- McMurtrie seems cheerier about the prospects of the shell-shocked than you might expect. The patients who REALLY worry him are the tuberculous, who are also the most numerous single casualty classification: 12% of British casualties were discharged because of tuberculosis. Basically, the conditions necessary to maintain health in the tubercular patient (fresh air and sunlight) seem to be at odds with most industrial employment (which takes place indoors, in poorly ventilated rooms, in air that is hot or dusty or steamy or smoky or basically anything but fresh). McMurtrie tries to retain his upbeat tone, but it's clear that he foresees difficulty in finding these chaps employment that won't kill them.
- Aside from the tuberculous, however, McMurtrie thinks that most disabled soldiers can become productive and happy members of society if the public will only let them: “Successful crippled and blind men unanimously testify that the handicap of public opinion is a greater obstacle than amputation of limb or loss of sight.”
(He is perhaps more optimistic that the public opinion might be changed than turned out to be warranted by subsequent facts.)
I was also DELIGHTED to find that the book contains ads for other books that might interest the reader, including The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me, which is about "Two ‘short, fat, bald, middle-aged, inland Americans’ cross over to France with commissions from the Red Cross." This may be the only hilarious World War I memoir in existence and I instantly repaired to Gutenberg.org to see if they had it, and discovered not only that they DO, but that there's an entire section heading for World War I memoirs, of which there are MANY, including one by E. W. Hornung (!!!!) who wrote the Raffles series.
Unfortunately for me, the amputee memoir does not seem to have been a genre yet after the Great War. It would have been so useful to have a memoir by, say, a double leg amputee, preferably with lots of interesting detail about, for instance, when the hell electric wheelchairs were invented, because this seems to be unclear. I discovered Sir Benn Jack Brunel Cohen, a British MP who lost both legs above the knee in the Battle of Ypres and, according to Wikipedia, used an electric wheelchair thereafter, although also quoth Wikipedia electric wheelchairs were not invented until the 1930s, even though there's a character in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (first published in 1928) who has an electric wheelchair.
(However, as you can see in this Youtube video, Amputees Learn to Use Artificial Limbs, manual self-propelled wheelchairs were already a thing during World War I: there are a couple guys propelling themselves in the wheelchair race at the beginning of the video.)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 04:34 am (UTC)May I assume that, either through Pat Barker's fiction or your nonfiction reading, you have run across W. H. R. Rivers?
no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 08:26 pm (UTC)I did discover him through Barker's Regeneration trilogy, but then he turned out to be exactly that weird and interesting—and good at his job—in real life, which I really appreciated.
I actually have a character who might very well have read him, he ought at least to get a name drop...
Awesome!
no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 09:00 am (UTC)That's amazing! I look forward to you reporting back.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 07:24 pm (UTC)At first I was like "blind piano tuners WTF???" because OMFG there are SO MANY tiny fiddly working parts in a piano -- like, more than in a car engine -- but apparently it was considered a "blind trade" and the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind piano tuning training program was still going in the 1960s! And there's even a famous blind piano tuner here in my city! But...people now are apparently doing it through cell phones AND APPS, and electric tuners, which just makes me want to cry.
https://mynorthwest.com/80872/the-dying-art-of-piano-tuning-and-a-blind-seattle-man-whos-keeping-the-profession-alive/?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/blind-piano-tuner-graeme-mcgowan-last-to-be-trained/12076868
....yeah look some of us hear "piano" and that's all she wrote, okay
no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 08:23 pm (UTC)The love interest in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" is a blind piano tuner!
no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 08:56 pm (UTC)I also have hopes about inserting a blind masseur - the fact that blind masseurs worked at army hospitals ought to make this easy! - however, I have not figured out how to do it without stopping the action dead to be all INFODUMP ABOUT LOUIE THE BLIND MASSEUR WHO REALLY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS STORY.
Maybe if Robert had a brief, intensely physical affair with Louie the Blind Masseur while he was cheering up his post-amputation blues by sleeping with many, many men.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-06 09:10 pm (UTC)This particular character could afford an electric wheelchair; haven't decided for sure if I'll give him one. You've got Brunel Cohen with his electric wheelchair, but you've also got Douglas Bader (lost his legs in the 1930s and then became a World War II flying ace) who escaped from German prisoner of war camps multiple times on his prosthetic legs, so there are clearly a lot of plausible outcomes for this injury.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-14 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-14 04:07 pm (UTC)