Hello, welcome to the history hit World Wars podcast. I'm James Rogers, and in this episode, first recorded for Dan's history hit, Dan talks with Susie Grogan about Shell Shock. In my own research for the Welcome Trusts, I analysed the history of this largely unrecognised, hard to diagnose illness that before the First World War was known as, well, perhaps nostalgia or cannonball wind. But in Suz's work, she goes much deeper and takes us on a history of this largely hidden illness. Today, we might better know some aspects of it as PTSD but its definition has changed over time and so Dan and Susie talk about those who were afflicted and really affected when they came back home from the battlefield,

how there are gendered aspects to the impact of war trauma,

but also about how this has been an enduring and persistent issue of warfare

from the First World War across the Second World War, into the Cold War and through to the 21st century.

Because there's one thing that's a guarantee about war,

and that's that it's going to have a massive disproportionate impact

on the human psyche. Thank you very much for coming to the podcast.

Well, thank you very much for having me on.

I mean, I could not be more interested in the subject and from what you've studied and looked at just how widespread was occurrences

of mental psychological trauma as a result of being in battle in the First World War?

Well, I looked at it from two different perspectives in a way

because I was very, very interested in the personal stories.

And there were lots of battlefield historians writing about the battles themselves

and it was the people and the life they led and the effect the battles had on them that was the part that

interested me and I was really surprised because there are

official figures, aren't there? And I know you covered this a bit in your recent program. There are official

figures and there are figures that have been estimated

since as to the real number of people that were seriously affected by the trauma of war.

I know the sort of official figures were sort of around about 80,000 men actually

diagnosed with Shell Shock or also as they called it war neuroses or

nearesthenia. Work that's been done by researchers such as Jay Winter

for example have estimated that because that was really only those men who were identified as having experienced that very close to the

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