The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Page A

they’d survived, as if the casualty count wasn’t enough to lend it gravity. Thinking back on the soldiers’ stories from that day, it is tempting to wonder if film, television, and, increasingly, video games don’t provide the lion’s share of our modern traumatic vocabulary, teaching us how to see our memories in the way that photography taught us how to see (and not see) sunsets, in the way that the minds of British soldiers from World War I were dominated by the poetic images of Kipling and Hardy, and in the way that Protestant Christianity guided the attitudes toward death and dying in the Civil War.
    In fact, the more you dig, the less secure PTSD’s place in history becomes and the more it seems to be a product of culture as much as a hardwired biological fact. Indeed, it is this historical slipperiness that led Allan Young, a medical anthropologist at McGill University, to declare that PTSD is an “invention,” arguing that “the dis­order is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources.”
    The earliest appearance of the word “traumatic,” according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, dates to 1656, and was used to indicate something “belonging to wounds or the cure of wounds.”(The modern, multimillion-dollar trauma centers we hear about at large hospitals today refer to this early definition.) Indeed, for the greater portion of its life in the English language, “trauma” adhered to this earlier meaning, and it took more than two centuries before the word was first used in any way resembling its current usage as something “emotionally disturbing or distressing.” Tellingly, the catalyst for this shift in meaning was technology, in this case the railroad. In 1866, a London surgeon named John Erichsen published a book titled
On Railway Spine and Other Injuries of the Nervous System
, in which he described, in a way characteristic of the Victorian period, how the shock of railway accidents “depleted the nervous energies of victims,” comparing the damaged spine to a magnetized horseshoe that has had its attractive force “jarred, shaken, or concussed” out of it.
    In other words, our current, deeply felt ideas about post-traumatic stress, what it means to be a survivor, and the basic vocabulary we use to communicate the aftermath of violence—ideas that are staples of the modern American media and seem so fundamental to the human condition as to be beyond question—are in fact not even as old as the United States of America, not even as old as the railroad.
    Nevertheless, some of the concepts that make up PTSD do have historical antecedents, and these traumatic responses have in some cases persisted in a manner not unlike traumatic memory itself—through long periods of ignorance and willful amnesia—and this reality makes the job of tracking down PTSD’s past that much more challenging. In the great class photo of mental health disorders, post-traumatic stress is like the odd kid at the edge of the frame who always moves just as the shutter trips, leaving him permanently out of focus, forever fuzzing into his neighbors: depression, grief, and generalized anxiety. And a late bloomer, too! His pre-1980 existence is seemingly dominated by a confusing series of name changes, misbegotten identity crises, denial, and flat-out ignorance before passing through the crucible of Nixon’s America, finally coming of age in 1980 with his induction into the DSM.
    Compared to depression, for instance, which enjoys a clear and almost aristocratic lineage within psychiatry, traceable directly to Hippocrates and the dawn of Western medicine, post-traumatic stress is a dim