The February issue of Social History of Medicine has just been released online and contains an article by Gwen A. Parsons entitled “ The Construction of Shell Shock in New Zealand, 1919–1939: A Reassessment .” The abstract reads:

This article explores the competing constructions of shell shock in New Zealand during and after the Great War. It begins by considering the army’s construction of shell shock as a discipline problem, before going on to consider the medical profession’s attempts to place it within a somatic and then psychogenic paradigm. While shell shock was initially viewed as a psychogenic condition in New Zealand, within a few years of the end of the war it had become increasingly subject to medical understandings of the psychiatric profession, who dominated the treatment of the mentally ill. It is the psychiatric understanding of shell shock which generally defined the treatment of shell shocked veterans within New…

The 2014 conference A Stranger In My Own Body is now open for registration.
Contact Christine Hill on 0411 556 205 or by email: christine.hill@monash.edu

You can download the registration form by clicking on the following link: FREUDCONF_REG_FORM_2014

or from our website: www.fruedconference.com

Download the 2014 brochure:

FreudCONF2014_brochure_WEB

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how bad much academic writing is. There’s nothing new in this. I’m sure people have been complaining about the aridity and complexity of academic writing since Edward Casaubon first put pen to paper in Middlemarch.

All writers, I’m sure, go through a stage where the imperative is to get everything down on the page.  It’s the next stage though – making those pages readable to either a specialist or a general audience (and deciding which one is more important) – that we academics particularly seem to struggle with. Partly, it’s the pressure to publish as quickly as possible, but sometimes there’s a perverse security to be found in woolly prose and arcane jargon that prove we are a part of the group.

A friend yesterday sent me the draft of  an article to read, with an apology that she used to…