PTSD and The American Civil War Written By Gaurav Roy
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sychological trauma has been with us humans in one form or another for thousands of years. It used to be with us when humans used sharp stones for hunting, and it’s still with us after thousands of years. A few literary accounts had also covered posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even before it was considered as a diagnosis. Books such as Henry IV, The Iliad, and A Tale of Two Cities have described traumatic experiences, symptoms and its aftermath. What’s in the Name? There were 150,000 disease-related deaths and 50,000 battle-induced deaths during the American Civil War (1861-1865) , according to Google. The deaths caused by diseases and the ongoing war were accounted for; however, there were no statistics that could provide an estimated number of deaths that were caused by psychiatric casualties.
18 – GATHER Veterans
PTSD was known by different names in the past. The physicians used to call it by names such as soldier’s heart, sunstroke, nostalgia, or irritable heart. A Promise! At the height of the civil war, surgeons figured out the impact of emotional distress on the psychiatric symptoms amongst soldiers. The surgeons concluded that the only way to reduce the death induced by “nostalgia” was to furlough the affected soldiers. Indeed, the promise of going home, far from the horrific scenes of the battleground, proved to be great medicine for affected soldiers, according to https:// warfarehistorynetwork.com/. The number of psychiatric casualties kept on increasing year-after-year during the civil war. In the last year of the war, the situation became so grave that the Surgeon General Moore was requested by Medical Director Carrington to establish a stand-alone hospital to treat mania
