Soldiers Don’t Go Mad - Notes

• Psychiatrists during the American Civil War thought that shell shock was instead a phenomenon they called “windage,” a molecular disruption of the spinal column from the vibration of speeding bullets and shells.

• Aphantasia: medical condition in which a person lacks visual memory, cannot remember images. From Greek for “absence of imagination.”

• In Greek mythology, Antaeus was the son of Poseidon and Gaia. He challenged Hercules to a wrestling match. Hercules threw Antaeus to the ground over and over, but each time Antaeus hit the earth, his power grew. Once Hercules realized this, he lifted Antaeus in the air and broke his back. In Dr. Arthur Brock’s view, shell shock victims are like Antaeus; the “war machine” has crushed their backs; and their cure lies in connection to the earth and community around them.

• Writing a travelogue of a city is a good means of connecting to the environment.

• Russia allowed women to vote before the US and UK.

• Pestilential: relating to or tending to cause infectious diseases.

• Pastiche: an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.

• Troglodyte: a hermit; a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.

• Sassoon ordered Owen, “Sweat your guts out writing poetry!” Owen took this as his benediction.

• Levant, (from the French lever, “to rise,” as in sunrise, meaning the east), historically, the region along the eastern Mediterranean shores, roughly corresponding to modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and certain adjacent areas.