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Samuel Pepys
After surviving the Great Fire of London, Samuel Pepys describes experiencing, and noticing in fellow Londoners, what appear to be classic PTSD symptoms: sleeplessness and anxiety. -
Nostalgia-Union Civil War
Thousands of Union Civil War combat veterans are hospitalized with “nostalgia,” a despondent, depressed state resulting from severe homesickness intensified by the stresses of military life. -
Railway Spine
1866
The New York Times reports a new disorder, “railway spine.” A passenger “gets out with...his body unbruised, and his mind unconscious of any disorder beyond a general weakness and confusion, which he sets down vaguely to a shock to the system, while his friends charitably attribute it to excessive fright.” -
Executed for Cowardice
More than 300 British soldiers, many suffering from “shell shock,” are executed for cowardice. In 2006 the United Kingdom grants the soldiers posthumous pardons. -
Frederick Walker Mott
Believed that explosions caused physical lesions on the brain, perhaps exacerbated by carbon monoxide or changes in atmospheric pressure.(Although Mott did believe that psychological trauma was part of the problem as well.) -
Charles Myers
Cases where "the tolerable or controllable limits of horror, fear, anxiety, etc. are overstepped." In 1940, at last, Myers published his groundbreaking study of 2,000 cases of shell shock, and was able to identify many cases which did not directly involve explosions. -
Patton
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, visiting wounded soldiers in a hospital in Sicily, asks one to describe his injuries. “It’s my nerves,” the soldier replies. Patton slaps him across the face and calls him a coward. -
Millais Culpin
described dissociative states that were linked to extreme terror. When he asked a soldier to close his eyes and describe his first experience of fighting, he "seemed to be living his experience over again with more than hallucinatory vividness, ducking as shells came over or trembling as he took refuge from them." -
Alan Cranston
Eight years after it was first proposed (and after being killed several times), Sen. Alan Cranston’s bill creating outreach centers for Vietnam veterans suffering from psychological problems related to their service is passed by Congress. -
Herbert Page
"railroad spine," a surgeon named Herbert Page who worked for the London and North West Railway published a whole book in 1890 called Injuries of the Spine and Spinal Cord Without Apparent Mechanical Lesion, in which he contended these patients were really suffering from "nervous shock," not physical injury." -
APA Diagnostics and Statistical Manual
The American Psychiatric Association, in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, recognizes PTSD as a disorder, replacing disorders related to specific traumas. -
RAND Corporation
A landmark study by the RAND Corporation estimates that 300,000 of the 1.64 million U.S. service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan may suffer from PTSD or depression—and that far too few are getting effective treatment.
