The essays in this book trace the origins of ongoing heated debates regarding trauma.

Contributors; Preface; 1. Trauma, psychiatry, and history: a conceptual and historiographical introduction Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale; Part I. Travel and Trauma in the Victorian Era: 2. The railway accident: trains, trauma, and technological crisis in nineteenth-century Britain Ralph Harrington; 3. Trains and trauma in the American gilded age Eric Caplan; Part II. Work, Accidents, and Trauma in the Early Welfare State: 4. Events, series, trauma: the probabilistic revolution of the mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Wolfgang Schäffner; 5. The German welfare state as a discourse of trauma Greg A. Eghigian; Part III. Theorizing Trauma: Psychiatry and Modernity at the Turn of the Century: 6. Jean-Martin Charcot and les névroses traumatiques: from medicine to culture in French trauma theory of the late nineteenth century Mark S. Micale; 7. From traumatic neurosis to male hysteria: the decline and fall of Hermann Oppenheim, 1889¿1919 Paul Lerner; 8. The construction of female sexual trauma in turn-of-the-century American mental medicine Lisa Cardyn; Part IV. Shock, Trauma, and Psychiatry in the First World War: 9. 'Why are they not cured?' British shellshock treatment during the Great War Peter Leese; 10. Psychiatrists, soldiers, and officers in Italy during the Great War Bruna Bianchi; 11. A Battle of Nerves: hysteria and its treatments in France during World War I Marc Roudebush; 13. Invisible wounds: the American legion, shell-shocked veterans, and American society, 1919¿1924 Caroline Cox; Index.