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in quite untechnical language
One last bit of Whose Body? that needed to be shared–this comes from quite near the end of the book but, out of context, doesn’t spoil anything: it’s a neurologist speaking to a WWI veteran who has recently suffered a nervous attack, a recurrence of his shell-shock. There’s a long diagnostic interview where they discuss the particular stressors that contributed to the attack and the patient’s history of such attacks, what caused them and what didn’t, and then the doctor proceeds to tell the patient about himself “in quite untechnical language.”
This book was written in 1923, which made it remarkable to me how thorough an explanation of the neurology of triggering and flashbacks it provided–and made available to any reader of mysteries in, say, the 20s-40s, regardless of what treatments were available.
“Well, now. You know quite well that the strain you put on your nerves during the war has left its mark on you. It has left what I may call old wounds in your brain. Sensations received by your nerve-endings sent messages to your brain, and produced minute physical changes there–changes which we are only beginning to be able to detect, even with our most delicate instruments. These changes in their turn set up sensations; or I should say, more accurately, that sensations are the names we give to these changes of tissue when we perceive them: we call them horror, fear, sense of responsibility and so on.”
“Yes, I follow you.”
“Very well. Now, if you stimulate those damaged places in your brain again, you run the risk of opening up the old wounds. I mean, that if you get nerve-sensations of any kind producing the reactions which we call horror, fear, and sense of responsibility, they may go on to make disturbance right along the old channel, and produce in their turn physical changes which you will call by the names you were accustomed to associate with them–dread of German mines, responsibility for the lives of your men, strained attention and the inability to distinguish small sounds through the overpowering noise of guns.”
“I see.”
“This effect would be increased by extraneous circumstances producing other familiar physical sensations–night, cold or the rattling of heavy traffic, for instance.”
(The doctor then goes on to recommend avoiding triggers forever rather than a program of careful exposure and desensitization to them, but he has some ulterior motives for that and anyway the patient ultimately does not take his advice.)
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This book was written in 1923, which made it remarkable to me how thorough an explanation of the neurology of triggering and flashbacks it provided–and made available to any reader of mysteries in, say, the 20s-40s, regardless of what treatments were available.
“Well, now. You know quite well that the strain you put on your nerves during the war has left its mark on you. It has left what I may call old wounds in your brain. Sensations received by your nerve-endings sent messages to your brain, and produced minute physical changes there–changes which we are only beginning to be able to detect, even with our most delicate instruments. These changes in their turn set up sensations; or I should say, more accurately, that sensations are the names we give to these changes of tissue when we perceive them: we call them horror, fear, sense of responsibility and so on.”
“Yes, I follow you.”
“Very well. Now, if you stimulate those damaged places in your brain again, you run the risk of opening up the old wounds. I mean, that if you get nerve-sensations of any kind producing the reactions which we call horror, fear, and sense of responsibility, they may go on to make disturbance right along the old channel, and produce in their turn physical changes which you will call by the names you were accustomed to associate with them–dread of German mines, responsibility for the lives of your men, strained attention and the inability to distinguish small sounds through the overpowering noise of guns.”
“I see.”
“This effect would be increased by extraneous circumstances producing other familiar physical sensations–night, cold or the rattling of heavy traffic, for instance.”
(The doctor then goes on to recommend avoiding triggers forever rather than a program of careful exposure and desensitization to them, but he has some ulterior motives for that and anyway the patient ultimately does not take his advice.)
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Nicely put :).
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Re: avoiding vs. desensitization to triggers: doctor's motives aside, there's another still-completely-relevant issue in the series which is that a lot of modern therapists would, in fact, still advise Peter to avoid certain triggers because they're so huge that desensitization is never going to work all that well. It's being responsible for people's deaths when he puts away murderers who then get executed. It sends him into varying degrees of PTSD breakdowns every single time. To him it's worth it, and I would say that that's his choice. But even a lot of modern therapists would think it's a bad choice and lean on him to not take murder cases.
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