I've seen this stuff on the television, you can imagine in earlier times you'd find them around the corner in your street so to say. "Death" in many forms from the innocent/innocuous to the downright gory was much more a part of everyday life as you go back time.
Remember people used to violently clash with deadly consequences over all sorts of matters. This is what drove people mad.Īpart from the past being an inherently more brutal time which might have bred a sense of being accustomed to visceral scenery. Compare this to the fighting in Vietnam (were very little quarter was given and POW camps were a hell on earth) or the endless rain of artillery shells coming from nowhere and going on for years raining down on a WW1 trench. During the Napoleonic wars a defeated army would generally surrender after several days of battle, be disarmed and return home to await negotiations. Medieval soldiers fought eye to eye, they could see their enemy and in many cases at least had the possibility to flee the field of battle if things took a bad turn. Modern warfare is, in a way, much more nerve racking than it was in earlier times. The point is, that in earlier times people who were wounded in the most intense fighting, usually died and any PTSD they might have later developed died with them. Getting shot in the stomach meant you were gone in Napoleonic times, but today in the modern western military even getting shot in the head doesn't have to be fatal. The typical combat wound however, has increasingly become less fatal over time. I would imaging this would have formed (to some degree at least) a kind of coping mechanism.Ī certain amount of people who suffer from PTSD have been wounded in combat. This contrasts starkly with the medieval knights, who essentially were born into a warrior culture and hence were much more used to the conditions of death and warfare. The World Wars mainly saw conscripted soldiers thrown into battle. Well I suppose the battle conditions and culture of medieval and early modern warfare had some influence in negating PTSD. I appreciate that mental health was not understood as it is today, but I have not even heard of the symptoms being recognised or recorded, let alone identifying the cause or having sympathy with it. And its not like there is a shortage of first hand accounts of battle from the 17th/18th/19th Century. This was an account by some chronicler (I can't remember the source annoyingly) of European Knight having nightmares of previous battles and would often wake screaming and in a feverish sweat.ĭid soldier of the past suffer like our armies today? I is hard to imagine the people going through events lie the Battle of Waterloo or Rhawkes Drift would not suffer the same mental health issues as our modern soldiers (if not worse considering the deprivations they went through!), but i have never seen any sources to suggest they did. I studied History at Bristol University and have a particular interest in military history, but have only once come across a sources sighting symptoms similar to PTSD pre-WW1.
GEORGE CARLIN YOUTUBE PTSD HOW TO
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GEORGE CARLIN YOUTUBE PTSD FREE
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