Crossing paths for psychologizing of trauma in medical knowledge by the end of the nineteenth century

Abstract

In this article, we will try to investigate three different ways which contributed to the process of “psychologizing” of trauma. First, Erichsen’s work (1866), a surgeon who explained certain cases of railway accident victims (which were located in a great field between the provable injury and simulation) with the framework of the pathological anatomy. Second, the physiological perspective of Page (1883), who tried to interpret that dubious territory of the clinic as a result of a Nervous Shock produced by an emotion that can alter the function without damaging the tissue. Finally, the lessons of Charcot in 1885, dedicated to traumatic hysteria, became plausible the idea that emotions and ideas could be traumatic by themselves, idea that was modeled on the action of hypnosis and suggestion in the nervous system. Throughout the text, we will try to justify that the transformations of the notion of trauma (and what each author could observe and think) depend on conceptual frameworks from which clinical experience was discussed.