Combat Exhaustion and Demobilization in the United States, 1941-50. (360G-Wellcome-082649_Z_07_Z)

Combat Exhaustion and Demobilisation in the United States, 1941-50 This proposed research project examines the relationship between medicine and psychiatry within the context of US involvement in World War II. The project will consider particularly the influence of new psychiatric nomenclature in terms of the treatment of illness and injury in World War II, with new terms such as 'combat exhaustion' and 'operational fatigue' replacing the 'shell shock' of World War I. My focus will be on induction procedures in the US armed forces for assessing the mental and physical health of recruits and on the rehabilitation of war casualties. My project will also examine (i) the medical-psychiatric interface by analysing clinical literature and reports written during and immediately after World War II and (ii) how combat exhaustion was represented in the cultural sphere, both in terms of training films made by the US Medical Army Department and the cycle of commercial 'demobilisation films' that were produced between 1946 and 1950. My concern is centrally with the US involvement in World War II, but I will consult British and Canadian military psychiatric texts and assess the changing psychiatric terminology with reference to World War I and the Korean War in the early 1950s.