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Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, Shell shock to PTSD: military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War, Maudsley Monographs, No. 47, Hove and New York, Psychology Press on behalf of the Maudsley, 2005, pp. xvii, 300, £24.95 (hardback 1-84169-580-7).
In the late 1940s, the United States Air Force was unsure which Soviet cities to target with its small nuclear arsenal. So it gave a Harvard team $1m to find out and, in the process, paid for two masterpieces, Merle Fainsod's How Russia is ruled and Alexander Dallin's German rule in Russia. Fifty years later, the British Ministry of Defence, facing legal action from a group of psychologically damaged veterans, commissioned an academic team to research the history of military psychiatry, which the services themselves had never bothered adequately to record.
The military's money was not wasted. The academic heavyweights hastily imported to the courtroom were able to give British military psychiatry an intellectual authority and humane face which its everyday practice, in the hands of underfunded medical journeymen, had largely lacked. The veterans' lawyers were outgunned and the judge impressed; the Ministry won the group action in 2003 (though it has since lost individual cases), and British taxpayers were saved millions of pounds. For their part, the well-funded academic team, having had privileged access to British records, were able to...