Author: Charles Glass Publisher: Bedford Square Publishers Price: £22 (Hardback) Released: Out now
Centred on the War Hospital for ‘shell shock’ at Craiglockhar t just outside Edinburgh during the First World War, Charles Glass narrates how the industrialised horror of modern warfare in France and Flanders saw thousands of soldiers struck down by ‘neurasthenia’, which we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD.
The facility at Craiglockhar t became something of a cradle for the treatment of the new phenomenon, with therapies created and administered by some of the leading medical minds of the age. Two of the patients treated there were Wilfred Own and Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon had already been awarded the Militar y Cross for bravery and was something of a hero to the younger Owen, to whom he became a mentor, helping him overcome his lack of self- confidence and share his burgeoning poetry with the world.