The First World War battle against mental trauma in Edinburgh
All the armies in the Great War had a word for it: the Germans called it “Kriegsneurose”; the French “la confusion mentale de la guerre”; the British “neurasthenia” and, when Dr Charles Samuel Myers introduced the soldiers’ slang into medical discourse in 1915, “shell shock.” Twenty-five years later, it was “battle fatigue.” By the end of the 20th century, it became post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In December 1914, a mere five months into “the war to end war,” Britain’s armed forces lost 10 per cent of all frontline officers and four per cent of enlisted men, the “other ranks,” to “nervous and mental shock.” An editorial that month in the British medical journal The Lancet lamented “the frequency with which hysteria, traumatic and otherwise, is showing itself.” A year later, the same publication noted that “nearly one-third of all admissions into medical wards [were] for neurasthenia”—21,747 officers and 490,673 enlisted personnel. Dr Frederick Walker Mott, director of London’s Central Pathological Laboratory, told the Medical Society of London in early 1916, “The employment of high explosives combined with trench warfare has produced a new epoch in military medical science.”Many of the broken men recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, illustrations, and poems. Two young officers treated for shell shock, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, rank among the finest poets of the war. Yet much of their verse would not have been written but for their psychotherapy. Chance brought the two poets together, and chance assigned each to a psychiatrist suited to his particular needs. These analysts acted as midwives to their works by interpreting their nightmares, clarifying their thoughts, and encouraging them in their creations. Owen, who in another context might have been left to languish in trauma, benefited from intensive therapy under Dr Arthur Brock. Brock’s interest in science, sociology, folklore, Greek mythology, and nature studies accorded with Owen’s. It was Brock who expanded Owen’s horizons and gave him the self-confidence to tackle sundry outside tasks and restore his mental balance. Sassoon, in contrast, enjoyed intellectual engagement with his psychiatrist, Dr William Halse Rivers, who did not trouble him with the outside activities that Brock imposed on Owen. Had Rivers treated Owen and Brock been responsible for Sassoon, this would have been a different story. Had both young officers been sent to different hospitals, they would not have met, and the poems they wrote would have been vastly different from the masterpieces the world knows.Following the disaster of the Somme, the War Office opened new hospitals expressly to deal with shell shock and treat what had become an epidemic. The best was a place in Scotland called Craiglockhart….Historians surmise that Craiglockhart took its name from the Scots Gaelic Creag Loch Ard —“crag or hill [on] the high lake,” although the hill boasts neither lake nor great height.There is a pond, but men dug it long after the outcrop received its name. Its twin peaks, known as Easter and Wester Craiglockhart hills, lay claim to the lowest altitude—a bare 200 feet above the sea—among seven hills that, like Rome’s, defined the topography of Scotland’s capital city. A stone castle protruded from the crag until the 13th century, but it played no significant role in the country’s turbulent history of dynastic and religious wars. It was already rubble when the Act of Union sealed Scotland’s connection to England in 1707. By the 19th century, a southwestern suburb of Edinburgh, Slateford, had absorbed the crag while retaining it as a rural sanctuary.The crag’s woods and meadows afforded a pastoral retreat from the somber stone mansions, filthy tenements, and notoriously disputatious politics of the city. Craiglockhart boasted unpolluted air, pure underground water, and panoramic views, not only of Edinburgh’s spires a mere three miles northeast, but of the Firth of Forth estuary and the 20-mile ridge of green wilderness known as the Pentland Hills.These natural advantages of curative waters, smokeless skies, invigorating vistas, and proximity to the capital’s wealth attracted a company of canny Scots merchants to erect a health spa of gargantuan proportions on 13 fertile acres.Expense was the least consideration for investors who engaged two of Scotland’s most prestigious architects, John Dick Peddie and Charles George Hood Kinnear, in 1877 to design the extravagant Craiglockhart Hydropathic Institution. This was the era of sumptuous health retreats for beneficiaries of Britain’s growing imperial bounty to “take the waters.” More than 20 such establishments sprang up in late 19th-century Scotland beside the lochs and up the glens, promising respite from counting houses, mills, and coal-infused air. Peddie and Kinnear adopted a design similar to another luxurious spa they were building 40 miles northwest of Craiglockhart, near the town of Dunblane. Both hydros would be massive fortresses of fine-cut ashlar sandstone playfully mixing Italian Renaissance motifs with the stolid mass of a Scots baronial manor.In 1878, workers demolished an old farmhouse, laid foundations, and erected scaffolds on a grassy hillock facing west from Wester Craiglockhart Hill. Over the following months, the villa’s imposing 280-foot-wide façade took shape, soaring from deep basements up three stories of bay windows and a classical balustrade to a pitched gray slate roof. Peddie and Kinnear mimicked fashionable styles from Doric columns on second-floor windows to a Japanese pagoda capping the five-storey central tower’s Italian belvedere. Wings at either end stretched behind and housed four floors of long corridors and multiple bedrooms. Turret-like gables and chimneys at irregular intervals lent the otherwise brooding structure a fairytale aura. A 50-by-20-foot swimming pool with Turkish bath in the basement offered, in the promoters’ words, “all the varieties of hot and cold plunge, vapour, spray, needle, douche nd electric baths.”Outdoors, gardeners cleared pathways through a forest of beech and Scotch pine. The landscape provided acres of lawns for an archery range, bowling greens, tennis courts, and croquet grounds. Harried Scottish burghers could exercise without straining themselves.The mock classical exterior belied interior conveniences as modern as any in Victorian Britain, including indoor plumbing for water closets, showers, and baths. The Tobin system of interior ventilation, metal tubes within wall cavities to recirculate the air, filtered smoke from the many fireplaces in bedrooms and common rooms alike. Guests could tumble out of bed, step down a marble staircase, and skip along the 140-foot hallway to the dining room for a full breakfast of porridge, eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding, toast, and tea. From there, they could wander into the billiard room, reading room, or Recreation Hall. Those in need would find the office of the medical superintendent, Dr Thomas Duddingston Wilson, on the ground floor.The Craiglockhart Hydropathic’s elegant portals opened to Edinburgh’s “worried wealthy” in 1880. Carriages and hansom cabs deposited patrons from Edinburgh at the foot of the stone walkway leading up a grass verge to the villa. Guests, while valuing the Hydro’s amenities, proved too few to cover the costs of construction, maintenance, staff, and taxes. The owners sold it in 1891 to a fellow Scotsman, 50-year-old architect James Bell. Bell already managed Peddie and Kinnear’s Dunblane Hydro, which he left to live and work at Craiglockhart as principal shareholder and managing director. He renamed it the Edinburgh Hydropathic.In October 1916, the War Office requistioned the Hydro for the treatment of the thousands of soldiers traumatised in combat. For the next three years, it would be the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers.Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry and Mental Illness During the First World War by Charles Glass is published by Bedford Square Publishers, £22, out now.