{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.014665942422596416, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.244067796610169, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Images of Disease: Science, Public Policy and Health in Post-war Europe (review)

especially significant in this regard, and makes his point convincingly in his analysis of the psychiatric impact of the battlefield replacement policies of the Americans and the British. Separate chapters are devoted to national efforts to develop procedures and technologies for properly selecting soldiers (with an eye to eliminating men most likely to break down or to simulate a breakdown); for motivating soldiers to fight, and to return to the front line following successful treatment for battle fatigue and breakdowns; and for managing chronic cases and compensation claims during the postwar period. The book also includes a superb chapter on British efforts at planning for and subsequently treating the civilian casualties of the air war. Shephard never loses sight of the tension between the medical and military imperatives that characterized American and British attitudes to psychiatric casualties. Psychiatrists were asked to heal men sufficiently for them to return to the front line, where their traumatizing fears of death and mutilation were likely to be realized. The perverse unfairness of this situation was obvious at the time, but so was the unfairness of abandoning those soldiers who remained at the front. Psychiatrists with first-hand knowledge of the battlefield were more likely to appreciate this point. For the Germans in both wars, the situation was less complex and therapeutic torture and summary execution were common. A War of Nerves is a splendid book. It is a sympathetic but entirely unsentimental look at military psychiatrists and their patients. Looking back over eight decades of diagnosing and treating war casualties, Shephard is impressed by the remarkable continuities rather than the changes and innovations.