Article ID: CBB000770494

On the Tracks of Trauma: Railway Spine Reconsidered (2003)

unapi

The nineteenth-century medical condition known as `railway spine' has recently received considerable attention from medical historians, particularly historians of psychiatry and related fields. An historical interpretation has developed which traces the origins of `modern' psychodynamic medicine to the responses of nineteenth-century medical practitioners to railway spine. This interpretation characterizes the debates over railway spine as being between adherents of `soma' (i.e. constrained by `traditional' Victorian medical thought) and `psyche' (i.e. looking forward to `modern' psychological approaches). This article argues that this conflict is too sharply drawn and produces a teleologically-driven and misleading impression of the real significance of railway spine. This condition was seen from first to last as an organic disorder, and medical/medico-legal debates over its nature were concerned with the character of the organic processes at work, not with seeking to overturn organic explanations altogether. This has important consequences for historical understanding of the place of railway spine in the emergence of twentieth-century conceptions of traumatic disorder.

...More

Description Questions claims about the historical connections between a 19th-century disease and modern psychodynamic medicine.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000770494/

Similar Citations

Article Chiara Thumiger; (2018)
A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought (/isis/citation/CBB530655622/)

Article Yorgos Dimitriadis; (2020)
History of the opposition between psychogenesis and organogenesis in classic psychiatry: Part 1 (/isis/citation/CBB157647685/)

Book Parle, Julie; (2007)
States of Mind: Searching For Mental Health in Natal and Zululand, 1868--1918 (/isis/citation/CBB001230333/)

Article Yorgos Dimitriadis; (2020)
History of the opposition between psychogenesis and organogenesis in classic psychiatry: Part 2 (/isis/citation/CBB764779105/)

Book Bivins, Roberta E.; Pickstone, John V.; (2007)
Medicine, Madness, and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter (/isis/citation/CBB000773359/)

Article Jacobsen, Kurt; (2010)
Diagnostic Politics: The Curious Case of Kanner's Syndrome (/isis/citation/CBB001232233/)

Book Höfer, Bernadette; (2009)
Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (/isis/citation/CBB001231104/)

Article Houston, R. A.; (2014)
A Latent Historiography? The Case of Psychiatry in Britain, 1500--1820 (/isis/citation/CBB001201200/)

Book Jackson, Mark; (2013)
The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (/isis/citation/CBB001212051/)

Book Fee, Dwight; (2000)
Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience (/isis/citation/CBB000102427/)

Book Blackshaw, Gemma; Wieber, Sabine; (2012)
Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (/isis/citation/CBB001211234/)

Book Amy Milne-Smith; (2022)
Out of his mind: Masculinity and mental illness in Victorian Britain (/isis/citation/CBB859380659/)

Article Buda, Octavian; (2010)
The Face of Madness in Romania: The Origin of Psychiatric Photography in Eastern Europe (/isis/citation/CBB001232241/)

Article José I Pérez Revuelta; José M Villagrán Moreno; (2021)
Moreau de Tours: organicism and subjectivity. Part 2: Moreau as psychopathologist (/isis/citation/CBB912675190/)

Article Jose I Pérez Revuelta; Jose M Villagrán Moreno; (2021)
Moreau de Tours: organicism and subjectivity. Part 1: Life and work (/isis/citation/CBB757360111/)

Article Hannah S. Decker; (2016)
Cyclical Swings: The Bête Noire of Psychiatry (/isis/citation/CBB171698648/)

Article Mauricio V Daker; (2019)
The theory of symptom complexes, mind and madness (/isis/citation/CBB264539507/)

Article Bartolucci, Chiara; Lombardo, Giovanni Pietro; (2016)
Il metodo clinico-differenziale di Enrico Morselli tra psichiatria e psicologia (/isis/citation/CBB966451901/)

Authors & Contributors
Revuelta, José I. Pérez
Moreno, José M. Villagrán
Dimitriadis, Yorgos
Daker, Mauricio V.
Thumiger, Chiara
Wieber, Sabine
Concepts
Mental disorders and diseases
Psychiatry
Psychology
Medicine
Historiography
Philosophy of medicine
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
21st century
18th century
17th century
Places
Great Britain
Romania
United States
South Africa
Italy
Greece
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment