Authors: Pat Barker

Tags: #World War I, #World War, #Historical, #Fiction, #1914-1918, #War Neuroses, #War & Military, #Military, #General, #History

Regeneration (35 page)

Rivers saw that he had reached Sassoon’s file. He read through the admission report and the notes that followed it. There was nothing more he wanted to say that he could say. He drew the final page towards him and wrote:
Nov. 26, 1917. Discharged to duty.

Author’s Note

______________________________________

Fact and fiction are so interwoven in this book that it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not. Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) did, in July 1917, protest against the continuation of the war. Robert Graves persuaded him to attend a Medical Board and he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he came under the care of Dr W. H. R. Rivers, FRS (1864–1922), the distinguished neurologist and social anthropologist, who then held the rank of captain in the RAMC. During Sassoon’s stay he formed a friendship with one of Dr Brock’s patients, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), though it is probably fair to say that this friendship played a more central role in Owen’s life, then and later, than it did in Sassoon’s.

Rivers’s methods of treating his patients are described in ‘The Repression of War Experience’
(Lancet
, 2 Feb. 1918) and in his posthumously published book
Conflict and Dream
(London, Kegan Paul, 1923), in which Sassoon makes a brief appearance as ‘Patient B’.

Dr Lewis Yealland’s rather different methods of treating his patients are described in detail in his book:
Hysterical Disorders of Warfare
(London, Macmillan, 1918).

There is an interesting discussion of Rivers’s pre-war work with Henry Head on nerve regeneration, and the concept of protopathic and epicritic innervation which evolved from it, in ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin’ by Jonathan Miller
(Listener
, 20 July 1972).

The amendments suggested by Sassoon to the early draft of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ appear in Sassoon’s handwriting on the MSS. See
Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments
, Vol. II, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Chatto & Windus, The Hogarth Press and Oxford University Press, 1983). Two modern texts which contain stimulating discussions of ‘shell-shock’ are
No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War
I by Eric Leed
(Cambridge University Press, 1979) and
The Female Malady
by Elaine Showalter (Virago Press, 1987).

Julian Dadd, whose psychiatric illness caused Sassoon some concern during his stay at Craiglockhart, subsequently went on to make a complete recovery.

I’m grateful for help received from the staff of the following libraries: Sheffield Public Library, Newcastle University Medical Library, Cambridge University Library, Napier Polytechnic Library, Edinburgh (formerly Craiglockhart War Hospital), The Oxford University English Faculty Library, the Imperial War Museum, and St John’s College, Cambridge, where the Deputy Librarian M. Pratt did much to make my visit interesting and enjoyable.