It seems that the first mention of the term

“traumatic neurosis” dates from that time: it was the title given in 1884 by the German physician Hermann Oppenheim2 to his book containing a description of 42 cases caused by railway or workplace accidents. This new diagnosis was vehemently criticized by Charcot who maintained that these cases were only forms of hysteria, neurasthenia, or hystero-neurasthenia.3 After Charcot’s death in 1893, the term traumatic neurosis made its way into French-language psychiatry: witness the Belgian psychiatrist Jean Crocq4 who in 1896 reported 28 cases caused by Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical railway accidents. It is at the time of Charcot’s famous Tuesday’s lectures that Janet (1889) and Freud (1893) discovered traumatic hysteria Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical with all its correlates: the dissociation caused by trauma, the pathogenic role of forgotten memories, and “cathartic” treatment. This was a first glimpse of what would later be known as the unconscious. The Russian-Japanese war (1904-5) was marked by the siege of Port Arthur and the naval battle of Tsushima. It was probably during this conflict that post-battle psychiatric symptoms were recognized for the first time as such by both doctors and military command. Russian psychiatrists – notably Avtocratov, who was in charge of a 50-bed psychiatric clearing hospital Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical at Harbin

in Manchuria – are credited with being the first to develop forward psychiatric treatment. This approach may have been a response to the difficulty of evacuating casualties over huge distances at a time when the Trans-Siberian Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Railway was not yet completed. Whatever the initial reason, forward treatment worked, and would again be confirmed as the best method during succeeding conflicts. The number of Russian psychiatric casualties was much larger than expected (1500 in 1904 and 2000 in 1905) and the Red Cross Society

of Russia was asked to assist. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical The German physician Honigman served in this body, and he was the first to coin the term “war neurosis” [Kriegsneurose] in 1907 for what was previously called “combat hysteria” and “combat neurasthenia”; also, he stressed the similarity between these cases and those reported by Oppenheim after railway accidents.5 World War I World War Resminostat I (WWI) was the first modern war fought with massive industrial means. This dubious distinction is also, to a Pictilisib molecular weight lesser degree, shared by the American Civil War. In any event, WWI is certainly the period in history when “modern” warfare coincided with a “scientific” psychiatry that endeavored to define diagnostic entities as we understand them today. The role played by WWI in advancing the knowledge of psychotraumatology in European psychiatry may be compared to that of WWII and the Vietnam War in American psychiatry.