Air Date: 101306
Subject: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Civil War
Book: Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War
Guest: Eric T. Dean Jr.
Summary: Dr. Eric T. Dean, esq., author of Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War, describes the phenomenon of psychiatric casualties in the Civil War.
Brett’s Summary: Eric T. Dean, a practicing lawyer who obtained his doctorate in history from Yale, is Gerry’s guest in this episode of Civil War Talk Radio. Dean became interested in mental illness in Civil War soldiers when he found that Indiana allows anyone to look at mental health records which are more than 70 years old. He then went on to research mental health files in nine other states as well. Dean wanted to see if the experience of Civil War veterans was similar to that of Vietnam veterans one hundred years later. He found that Civil War veterans definitely in some cases suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but he hesitated to give a specific number or percent citing incomplete records and the shoddy nature of recordkeeping prior to 1880.
Civil War Talk Radio airs most Fridays at 12 PM Pacific on World Talk Radio Studio A. Host Gerry Prokopowicz, the History Chair at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, interviews a guest each week and discusses their interest in the Civil War. Most interviews center around a book or books if the guest is an author. Other guests over the years have included public historians such as park rangers and museum curators, wargamers, bloggers, and even a member of an American Civil War Round Table located in London, England.
In this series of blog entries, I will be posting air dates, subjects, and guests, and if I have time, I’ll provide a brief summary of the program. You can find all of the past episodes I’ve entered into the blog by clicking on the Civil War Talk Radio category. Each program should appear either on or near the date it was first broadcast.
Check out more summaries of Civil War Talk Radio at TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog.
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