358 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 4  December 2012

Winner of the William M. Jones

Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the
2012 American Culture Association Conference

Emasculated by Trauma: A Social

History of Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder, Stigma, and Masculinity
Sheena M. Eagan Chamberlin
The suppression of fear and other strong emotions is
not demanded only of men in the trenches. It is con-
stantly expected in ordinary society.
-Elliott Smith and T. H. Pear, 19171
The history of medicine is a social one.
Although medical knowledge and its history are
often understood as objective fact, divorced from
cultural and social context, historians of medicine
have recently begun to undermine these assump-
tions. Social histories of medicine have put forth
a thesis about the social nature of knowledge,
specifically related to health, disease and medi-
cine. Namely, the way a disease is understood,
treated and talked about is shaped not only by
medical knowledge, but also by broader cultural,
social and political climates and ideologies. This
social construction of disease is evident across the
history of medicine but is perhaps most promi-
nent in the history of mind-body medicine. The
history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
and other war-related traumatic disorders is a
study in evolving American sensibilities, social
mores, and gendered cultural expectations. Since
its first appearance on the battlefield, PTSD and
its predecessors were used by Americans to
symbolize the manifestation of societal concerns
surrounding unfulfilled gender roles, tightly
bound to concepts of heteronormativity.
Trauma-related nervous disorders became the
mark of someone who had failed to live up to
culturally constructed notions of the ideal male
citizen soldier. Thus, victims were blamed for
their unmanly behaviour by way of stigmatizing
medical diagnoses.
Cultural mores surrounding gendered social
roles have long shaped both the medical under-
standing of PTSD (and related predecessors) and
the way its victims are treated and regarded
within the societal framework. According to Har-
vard historian Ann Harrington, a cultural inabil-
ity to understand the non-physical properties that

Sheena M. Eagan Chamberlin, a doctoral candidate in the medical humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, is majoring in
medical ethics and the history of medicine, with a special focus in military medicine. She is also an adjunct instructor of philosophy at
St Mary’s University. Her research and teaching interests include medical humanities, medical ethics, history of medicine, military
medicine, public health ethics, research ethics, and health policy.
The Journal of American Culture, 35:4
© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
 Emasculated by Trauma: A Social History of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stigma, and Masculinity
lead to disease and ill health has caused society to
explain these health problems through a variety
of narratives. Harrington grounds western
culture’s inability to comprehend mind-body
medicine in modern medicine’s foundational
assumption of the physicality of illness. Namely,
modern western medicine believes that physical
illness must have a physical cause. This assump-
tion is what makes mind-body medicine so
complicated. Due to the ambiguity and lack of
understanding surrounding the connections
between mind-body, physicalist cultures must
turn to narratives as a way of explaining what
does not fit into the physicalist medical paradigm.
These narratives are useful in understanding the
experiences of bodies and minds and how they
have been understood within specific cultural
contexts throughout history.
Harrington explores six narratives in her book:
power of suggestion, body that speaks, the power
of positive thinking, broken by modern life, heal-
ing ties and eastward journeys.2 While quite
expansive in scope, these narratives do not repre-
sent an exhaustive list and fail to adequately
address the stories surrounding battlefield
trauma. In light of this, another narrative of
mind-body medicine is needed. Within this narra-
tive, entitled “emasculated by trauma,” the male
body speaks of the trauma it has experienced on
the modern battlefield, marrying the two narra-
tives of “the body that speaks” and “broken by
modern life.” However, this story is also one of
soldiers as failed citizen subjects. Soldiers suffer-
ing the effects of trauma show an inability to
exhibit the virtues of the ideal male, by failing to
meet expected gender norms and fulfil male gen-
der roles. Soldiers are still and have historically
been expected to be strong and fearless, but
trauma-related nervous disorders such as PTSD
serve to expose the vulnerabilities and frailty of
these men. Therefore, this narrative explains both
a soldier’s failure to fulfil the cultural expecta-
tions of men, as well as cultural and institutional
notions of the good soldier. This narrative is enti-
tled “emasculated by trauma” because it repre-
sents a medico-cultural attempt to explain
behaviour that does not conform to gendered
359
social and institutional norms. This narrative
explains PTSD as the medicalized result of sol-
diers’ failure to fulfil the expectations imposed on
them by a heteronormative society. These sol-
diers, victims of war-trauma, failed to be strong
and unbreakable; they were broken by the trauma
of war.
The sources used to shape this story are indic-
ative of social history, drawing on all types of
primary source material: medical, scientific and
lay. The history of mind-body medicine is one
that venerates the narrative form, recognizing the
cultural need for stories that explain the other-
wise inexplicable. For this reason stories are
essential to the history of mind-body medicine.
As Harrington has argued, these narratives allow
a physicalist culture to find meaning and expla-
nation in disease and illness that fall far beyond
the modern medical paradigm. Beyond that,
these narratives make sense of behaviour that
does not align with the specifically gendered
expectations of heteronormative society. In order
to gather a full picture of the historical narratives
employed to understand disorders of war-
trauma, medical and scientific texts are used in
tandem with personal recollections and lay press.
This bricolage technique, borrowed from con-
cepts in visual arts, insists on using all primary
source material available in order to create a full
historical picture.
Understanding the historical narratives of
PTSD is important in understanding the disease,
its treatment and its victims. Although soldiers
are trained to kill and expected to be fearlessly
unaffected by war, this is not the reality.
Throughout the history of war, men have been
both mentally and physically broken by the bat-
tlefield. The carnage of war has often left military
medicine struggling to maintain its fighting force
and adequately treat its soldiers. This struggle is
particularly true of war psychiatry and the health
problems it addresses, such as PTSD and other
trauma related psychological disorders. These dis-
orders represent a complicated intersection
between mind and body that is both ambiguous
and lacks disease specificity, making it difficult
for medicine to understand and interpret.
360 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 4  December 2012
PTSD in the Past
The first discussions of trauma related nervous
disorders on the battlefield began during the early
1800s. During this time, military doctors had
begun to diagnose soldiers with “exhaustion” fol-
lowing the stress of battle. This “exhaustion” was
often characterized by mental shutdown as a
result of trauma. Unable to treat this ambiguous
disorder, physicians resorted to the mere prescrip-
tion of rest. Supposed to possess the strength nec-
essary to stave off fear (or at the very least hide it),
these soldiers were treated with “3 hots and a cot”
before being sent back to the front lines to con-
tinue fighting. At this time, it was not understood
as a legitimate illness or disability but rather phys-
ical exhaustion. Soldiers were men: they were
strong, not scared or traumatized; only tired.
In 1876, Dr. Mendez DaCosta medicalized this
exhaustion by publishing a paper that created the
diagnostic label of “Soldier’s Heart” among Civil
War combat veterans (Hegadoren and Lasiuk).
Dr. DaCosta’s concept of “Soldier’s Heart” grew
out of the work of Dr. Arthur Meyer. Meyer had
observed that combat soldiers serving in active
war zones often exhibited distress characterized
by arousal of the cardiovascular system. Symp-
toms of this disorder included extreme fatigue,
dyspnea, heart palpitations, sweating, tremors,
and loss of consciousness. Incidence of this disor-
der was relatively high during the Civil War; 5,213
cases were reported during the first year or 2.34
per 1000, this incidence rose to 3.3 per 1000 during
the second year of the war (Bourne 2). Like many
other nervous disorders, soldier’s heart had many
names including irritable heart, effort syndrome,
nostalgia and DaCosta’s syndrome (Birmes et al.).
Interestingly, there was little agreement about
the etiology of this disorder. Some presumed
the source of illness to be of strictly biological
origin. Among European medical authorities,
this belief was widely accepted. They believed
that the soldier’s behaviour could be explained
as resulting from concussions sustained during
constant artillery bombardment (Bourne 10). By
formulating the nervous illness in this way, it
provided an honorable explanation of symptoms
and behaviours that served to remove blame and
stigma from the individual soldier. Both individ-
ual physicians and the military were able to
avoid dealing with behaviour that failed to con-
form to the heteronormative ideal. Instead of
diagnosing personal failure, or dealing with the
ambiguity of mind-body medicine, this explana-
tion permitted the acceptance of a physicalist
medical model. Others believed these problems
were of psychological origin (Lamprecht et al.).
Regardless of origins, these disorders posed a
serious problem for military physicians. Not
only did this type of disorder often lead to
severe and lasting disability, crippling the fight-
ing force, it was also ambiguous and thus diffi-
cult to diagnose. There was no obvious disease
pathology, which made it difficult to distinguish
between legitimate and illegitimate cases. This
ambiguity led to accusations of malingering
among soldiers.
After the work of Meyers and DaCosta, inter-
est in the study of trauma waned until the brutal-
ity of the First World War. By the winter of 1914,
there was an epidemic of mental breakdown
among the troops and by the end of the war mili-
tary physicians had seen over 80,000 cases. One of
the main reasons for this epidemic was the trau-
matic environment of the Great War. Soldiers of
this horrific trench warfare experienced pro-
longed exposure to constant threats against their
own life, while also often witnessing the mutila-
tion and deaths of their friends and comrades.
According to Arthur Hurst, in his work Medical
Diseases of the War:
Life in the trenches is always accompanied by a state
of nervous tension. Danger is ever present, and during
periods of activity a man can only sleep at odd
moments, and the night may only bring increased
responsibility and anxiety instead of rest, especially to
young officers. (6-7)
Due to this constant bombardment of trauma
soldiers, “began to act like hysterical women.
They screamed and wept uncontrollably. They
froze and could not move. They became mute and
unresponsive. They lost their memory and the
capacity to feel” (Herman 20).
 Emasculated by Trauma: A Social History of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stigma, and Masculinity
DaCosta’s concept of Soldier’s heart fell away,
and a British military psychiatrist named Charles
Samuel Meyers coined a new term: shell shock.
Falling in line with the physicalist thinking on the
topic, Dr. Meyers postulated that shell shock was
caused by cerebral concussions and the rupture of
small blood vessels resulting from proximity to
exploding shells. However, his initial explanation
became inadequate when soldiers who had not
served in live warfare began to exhibit symptoms
of the disorder. In light of this, Myers distin-
guished the neurological condition of shell concus-
sion from the psychological disorder of shell shock
that could be caused by exposure to the intense
and horrific conditions of war.
The differentiation between the neurological
and psychological served to delineate two differ-
ent and specific patient populations. The good
soldier, a man who was both strong and brave,
might succumb to shell concussion but not shell
shock. In fact, physicians of the time had begun to
stigmatize victims of shell shock as weaker men,
unfit to be real soldiers and unfit for warfare. In
his book, The Anatomy of Courage, war psychia-
trist Lord Moran recounted stigmatizing descrip-
tions of psychiatric casualties such as this:
There were others who were plainly worthless fellows.
One without moral sense had taken a commission
under the shadow of compulsion … sitting there with
his head in his hands at the bottom of the trench; he
could do no good to the men of 1916. He showed none
of the extreme signs of fear he was just a worthless
chap, without shame, the worst product of the towns.
This stigmatization of shell shock victims is
repeated throughout the literature of the era.
Some even went so far as to suggest that these
malingerers deserved to be shot for their coward-
ice. Men who fell victim to these psychological
disorders were believed to have been predisposed
to these illnesses due to personal or familial weak-
ness. In the opening paragraph of his 1918 book
entitled Medical Diseases of the War, Arthur
Hurst describes the chief predisposing causes of
war neuroses as “congenital nervousness, a previ-
ous mental breakdown, concussion and chronic
alcoholism.” (1) According to Hurst, constitu-
tionally weak and timid men were,
361
… more liable than the average soldier to all war neu-
roses, and if blown up by a high explosive shell, they
are almost certain to develop hysterical symptoms in
addition to the symptoms due to concussion, which
alone constitute pure shell-shock. (2)
Many believed that the number of timid soldiers,
predisposed to shell shock, was markedly
increased by the introduction of compulsory
service. By stigmatizing the victims of shell shock,
medical authority served to further valourize the
good and mentally unbreakable soldier. Accord-
ing to Hurst,
A man with a good family history, who has never suf-
fered from any nervous disability, only develops war
neuroses, including shell-shock, under exceptional cir-
cumstances. (3)
The strict delineation between neurological and
psychological disease would later fall away. How-
ever, it is pertinent to note that stigma persists
today due in large part to the narrative that
surrounds these disorders. Men in general, and
soldiers in particular are still expected to be fear-
less and strong; the vulnerability of a man who
has been broken by the trauma of war fails to live
up to cultural beliefs surrounding the idea of
maleness. This conception of manliness was no
different in the early twentieth century. As
described by Elaine Showalter, the public image
of the Great War had been one of strong, unre-
flective masculinity. In fact, the value promoted
within the male community of this time was, “the
ability to tolerate the appalling filth and stink of
the trenches, the relentless noise, and the constant
threat of death with stoic good humor.” (169)
Soldiers who had been “wounded in the mind”
failed to live up to this highly heteronormative
image; an image that venerated war as a truly
manly activity that would enable these men to
show their strength and bravery to their families
and the world.
Once peace had been achieved, the plight of
these soldiers fell from the spotlight, and interest
in the study of trauma faded once again. How-
ever, with the beginning of the Second World
War the ramifications of war trauma on the fight-
ing force were again thrust into the limelight.
The term “shell shock” was followed in WWII
362 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 4  December 2012
by the term “combat fatigue.” Due to concerns
regarding the high economic costs of psychiatric
casualties during the First World War, the US
military began psychiatric screening of enlistees
(Marlowe). They had hoped to avoid enlisting
men who were psychologically unfit to endure
the intensity of war. Essentially, they were
attempting to enlist only those men that would
prove to be good soldiers. They wanted to weed
out those predisposed to psychological disorder,
creating an army of brave, strong men who could
endure the horror of war.
Despite these efforts, soldiers continued to
develop psychological and physical reactions to
the trauma of the battlefield. Continuing occur-
rence of this disease, despite psychological screen-
ing, made it clear that all men were vulnerable to
the terror of warfare; everyone had their breaking
point. This acknowledgment shifted medical and
cultural understanding of these victims of war
from individual biological or psychological weak-
ness to the role of the environment in altering psy-
chological and physiological behaviour. Although
these disorders still represented a failure to fulfill
expected roles, the possible vulnerability of all
men in the face of war was now recognized.
The recognition of the importance of environ-
ment was reinforced by the work of Herbert Spie-
gel. Spiegel showed that the primary indicator of a
man’s ability to cope with combat trauma was the
support of his fellow soldiers. If external factors
were to blame for breaking these men, then surely
external factors could also act as prophylaxis.
Speigel’s work paved the way for “front-line
psychiatry”, a new branch of psychiatry driven by
the mantra of “proximity, immediacy, and expec-
tancy.” Combat psychiatrists were now even
closer to the frontlines attempting to maintain the
protective effect of the fighting units by keeping
traumatized patients closer to their support sys-
tem. This also served the mission of the military
medical corps (to maintain the fighting force) by
ensuring that more soldiers could be returned to
battle at faster rates.
This time once the war was over interest in the
topic did not wane, as clinicians and researchers
continued to study these issues, even broadening
their focus to include both military and civilian
trauma victims. The Vietnam War provided an
additional thrust, elevating the importance of
these issues in the social and medical spheres.
Since combat fatigue had been a leading source of
attrition during the Second World War and
Korean War, the US military expected the traitor-
ous jungle warfare of Vietnam to increase the
likelihood of an epidemic of this type of trauma
related nervous disorder (Bourne vii).
It is necessary to note that discussions of this
type of traumatic disorder were not limited to the
military and medical spheres. Lay people were
also taking an interest in the disorder that was
breaking the minds of America’s strong young
men. In this way it to possible to see the narrative
building across American culture. This language
and subject matter was not unique to the medical
lexicon. An example of this is Mrs. Patience
Mason’s book, Recovering From The War: A
Woman’s Guide to Helping Your Vietnam
Veteran, Your Family, and Yourself. This book
was dedicated to discussing the issues of trauma
and soldiers’ health. Mason’s book was written
for other laypeople and picked up on similar
themes of trauma, experience and heteronorma-
tive masculinity.
After the Vietnam War, veterans and mental
health professionals succeeded in influencing the
third revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), creating
the diagnostic category PTSD. The preliminary
definition of PTSD described a psychological
condition experienced by a person who had
faced a traumatic event, which caused a cata-
strophic stressor outside the range of usual
human experience. The type of traumatic events
that were now understood as potentially leading
to PTSD included, but were not limited to,
military combat, violent personal assault, being
kidnapped or taken hostage, terrorist attack,
torture, incarceration as a prisoner of war or in a
concentration camp, natural or manmade disas-
ters, severe automobile accidents, or being diag-
nosed with a life-threatening illness. Since this
time, research and understanding of PTSD has
continued to evolve.
 Emasculated by Trauma: A Social History of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stigma, and Masculinity
PTSD Today
PTSD is now described as a debilitating condi-
tion that can affect every aspect of a patient’s life
due to its multifaceted composition of mental,
physical and social symptoms. This psychological
illness plagues many Americans, and has been
increasing in prevalence within military popula-
tions due largely to the wars in Iraq and Afghani-
stan and the horrors soldiers have experienced
fighting there. Despite its presence in wars past,
PTSD is reaching epidemic proportions in the
modern military. In fact, of the 1.64 million sol-
diers who have been deployed for Operation
Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom
(OEF/OIF) approximately 300,000 individuals
are currently suffering from PTSD or major
depression, placing the disease prevalence at 23%,
meaning that PTSD rates in the military are four
times higher than that of the average American
male (5%) and twice that of the national data for
women (10.4%) (US Department of Veteran’s
Affairs). Only the Gulf War had comparable
PTSD rates, but experts have said that OEF/OIF
will likely have much higher PTSD rates once the
war is over and proper statistics can be gathered.
In light of this dramatic increase in PTSD, a
great deal of biomedical research has focused on
this issue. Due to this attention, the understanding
of PTSD has become increasingly clinical and
medicalized. However, the underlying theme
remains the same: these disorders represent the
medicalization of a soldier’s inability to live up to
cultural expectations of male strength.
Current clinical literature on PTSD describes
this disorder as the development of characteristic
symptoms following exposure to an extreme trau-
matic event. This traumatic event is a first-hand
experience that characteristically involves a threat
of death or serious injury, or witnessing an event
that involves death, injury, or a threat to the phys-
ical integrity of another person. PTSD sufferers
respond to the traumatic event with intense fear,
helplessness and horror. Symptoms include per-
sistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event,
363
persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the
trauma, general unresponsiveness, and persistent
symptoms of increased arousal.
The re-experiencing of the traumatic event
manifests in various ways. Commonly this
re-experiencing occurs in the form of recurrent
and intrusive recollections of the event or dreams
that replay the experience. In rare and extreme
cases, the patient can experience dissociative
states, during which components of the event are
relived and the person behaves as though experi-
encing the event at that moment. Victims of PTSD
suffer intense psychological distress in response to
triggering events. Often, soldiers find it difficult
to deal with the intense emotions brought about
by these triggers and are often reduced to uncon-
trollable behaviour (such as crying or lashing out
at others). The emotional re-experiencing of the
traumatic event is the trademark symptom of
PTSD, prompting many of the other symptoms
(such as avoidance). Other persistent symptoms
include anxiety or increased arousal not present
prior to the trauma. This may include insomnia
cause by recurrent and horrifying nightmares,
hyper-vigilance, and exaggerated startle response.
The soldier fails to be the strong man he is
expected to be and is reduced to a tearful, men-
tally broken one.
Avoidance is now understood as being another
important symptom of PTSD. Patients commonly
avoid thoughts, conversations, activities, people
and feelings related to the traumatic event. Avoid-
ance occasionally manifests itself in the form of
amnesia for an important aspect of the traumatic
event and diminished responsiveness to the exter-
nal world. This phenomenon is often referred to
as “psychic numbing or emotional anaesthesia.”
Diminished interest in participation in previously
enjoyed activities, the feeling of detachment/
estrangement from other people, or of having
decreased ability to feel emotions of intimacy,
tenderness, and sexuality is another significant
symptom of PTSD. These symptoms combine to
create a sense of foreshortened future in the PTSD
patient. These patients sometime do not expect to
have a successful career, marriage, children, or a
normal life span. Thus, PTSD injures them. Once
364 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 4  December 2012
seen as the ideal male, the ambitious soldier is
completely changed by the trauma of war.
Of interest to this discussion is the contempo-
rary extension of PTSD. In the wake of the cur-
rent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the PTSD
diagnostic category has been expanded to include
those with second-hand knowledge of the trauma
of war. According to the DSM-IV, PTSD can also
result from the unexpected discovery of violent
death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury
experienced by a family member or loved one.
This phenomenon is known as secondary PTSD.
Interestingly, while primary PTSD (or that result-
ing from first-hand experience) has been able to
shed most of the shame once associated with it,
secondary PTSD has not escaped the stigma.
Those diagnosed as suffering from secondary
PTSD are even more likely to be written off as
malingering and seen as weak. This stigmatization
is easy to understand in light of the narrative dis-
cussed. Soldiers are supposed to be brave and
strong, men that can be idolized and understood
as possessing the virtues of the ideal male citizen
subject. Extraordinarily traumatic events, such as
war, are now understood to be capable of break-
ing even the strongest man. However, it is harder
to understand how a good soldier can be broken
by second-hand knowledge of these traumas. This
narrative driven understanding has led to descrip-
tions of secondary PTSD victims that mirror that
of Lord Moran’s useless and fearful soldier from
the early twentieth century.
Conclusion
The male-bound explanation of nervous disor-
ders explored in this narrative has a decidedly
specific purpose; it is useful in medicalizing
behaviour that deviates from the heteronormative
cultural expectation of unfaltering masculinity.
These victims fell short of fulfilling the roles set
out for them. They were not brave or strong; they
were mentally weak and vulnerable. Their failure
to live up to a culturally understood heteronorma-
tive ideal was initially met with stigmatization
and attempts to blame the victim. The military
and medical institution pointed to personal or
familial weakness as predisposing factors leading
men to fall victim to this illness. However, as
attempts to weed out these weak men proved
futile, the vulnerabilities of all men were recog-
nized. It was not the man; it was the horror of the
battlefield.
The narrative surrounding PTSD then provided
an honourable explanation for men breaking
down under stress, allowing soldiers to preserve
their self-respect. By medicalizing this unmanly
behaviour, doctors avoided being forced to diag-
nose personal failure, while military authorities
avoided explaining the emasculating behaviour or
cowardice of previously brave soldiers. This type
of nervous disorder, which intimately links the
trauma of war to men’s inability to exhibit tradi-
tional male attitudes or behaviours and fulfill
social and institutional gender roles, has remained
a part of western culture, changing like a chame-
leon from soldier’s heart, to shell shock and
finally to PTSD.
Modern warfare has only increased the inci-
dence of these disorders. With the introduction of
improved personal body armour, soldiers are now
surviving attacks that would have been fatal in
past wars. The carnage of improvised explosive
devices is offset by improved battlefield medical
care, leaving soldiers alive but with battered and
mangled minds and bodies. For some who have
been physically unharmed by war the mental scars
are just as deep and just as crippling.
This modern epidemic has led to increased
attention and study on the topic, rendering
understandings of this disorder to be increasingly
clinical. However, common theme can be traced
throughout the history of PTSD and remain
present today: PTSD is diagnosed when those
people expected to be brave and strong, fall short
of these expectations. Therefore, PTSD medical-
izes the failed male citizen subject. Our culture
may not fully understand the mechanisms of the
relationship between mind and body, but we
know that when men are emasculated by trauma,
when they are sad, scared and vulnerable, they
must be sick.
 Emasculated by Trauma: A Social History of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stigma, and Masculinity
Notes
1. Elliott Smith and Tom Hatherley Pear, Shell-Shock and Its
Lessons (London: Longmans and Green, 1917). Cited in: Showalter,
“Male Hysteria: W.H.R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock.”
2. The first narrative is entitled the “power of suggestion” and
explores the historical emergence of a sceptical narrative in mind-
body medicine. Patients under the influence of charismatic authority
figures experienced what appeared to be biological bodily experi-
ences, but were in fact events bound in the domain of the mind. This
included animal magnetism, mesmerism and hypnotism. The next
narrative is called the “body that speaks” and forms a sort of detec-
tive narrative of mind-body medicine. This narrative arose as a chal-
lenge to the reigning medical authority that had dismissed the
disorder of hysteria (and all its symptoms) as merely the product of
suggestion. This narrative insists that even those experiences of ill
bodies that cannot be explained with physicalist medicine are impor-
tant and must be valued in order to bring about healing. The
history of this specific story in closely tied to trauma and spans from
hysteria, to the emergence of psychoanalysis and the current diag-
nostic category of Post-traumatic stress disorder. In opposition to
the last narrative where a body was rendered ill by the mind’s
response to trauma, “the power of positive thinking” offers a narra-
tive that emphasizes a patient’s ability to heal their body using pow-
ers of the mind. The historical components of this narrative involve
cases such as Norman Cousins and the miraculous placebo effect.
“Broken by modern life” is a narrative that explains illness as a result
of the unnatural lives now lived by modern man. The stress of the
harried and artificial life of modernity exhausts and overextends our
capacities resulting in illness. The “healing ties” narrative is one that
offers solutions to a patient broken by modern life. This narrative
discusses the importance of social support in healing and condemns
modern culture for distancing people and patients from their families
and close friends. The last narrative entitled “eastward journeys”
explores the western preoccupation with the East. In this narrative,
we see modern western culture looking to the ancient traditions of
the eastern medicine for healing.
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