Promotional Information

'Ben Shephard's study of how war wounds men's minds and of medicine's efforts to heal the damage done, is based on years of dedicated research. It is the best book I have read on the subject and will endure.' John Keegan

About the Author

Ben Shephard read History at Oxford University. He was a Producer on the television series The World at War and The Nuclear Age and has made numerous historical and scientific documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. He is the author of the critically acclaimed A War of Nerves- Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914-1994 and After Daybreak- The Liberation of Belsen, 1945. He lives in Bristol.

Reviews

Shephard's engaging and impressively researched study offers a detailed survey of psychiatric - and to a lesser extent, social and cultural - responses to war trauma from the First World War to the Gulf War of 1991... Thorough, thought-provoking and enormously informative
*Times Literary Supplement*

This detailed study of psychiatric casualties in war will surely become the standard work of reference on this complex, difficult subject...enthralling
*The Times*

Outstanding... Shepard tells this story with the skill of a thriller-writer as well as the assiduous pride of a historian... A bold, harrowing, provocative, fiercely intelligent work
*Scotland on Sunday*

An utterly absorbing study of the century-long relationship between psychiatry and the military... The richness of his story derives from the sheer variety of experiences and personalities that it incorporates
*Literary Review*

Lively, discursive, constantly absorbing...succeeds for the most part in maintaining an admirably dispassionate position between the dismissive strictures of the hardened critic of modern psychiatry on the one hand and the exuberant messianic certainties of the zealots of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and drugs on the other
*Sunday Times*