Battle exhaustion: soldiers and psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939–1945

on influenza epidemiology by Patterson or Cliff, Haggett and Ord makes it now look distinctly dated. As befits a thesis, Black October is thickly studded with footnotes, sometimes four or five to a sentence, with a bewildering variety of abbreviations, only seven of which are listed on p. xi. Also irritating for non-South African readers are the untranslated quotations in Afrikaans. Yet many commendable strengths remain, for readers willing to wade through the footnotes. Phillips appears to have scoured every conceivable archival source, official and private, and every newspaper, periodical, and public report between 1918 and about 1925 in search of even the briefest mention of influenza. In addition to over a hundred interviews with survivors, he has collected several hundred letters giving first-hand accounts of the epidemic. No wonder this thesis was seven years in the making; the depth and diversity of its evidential base is most impressive. Phillips candidly admits his reliance on official statistics, which he says are "probably reasonably accurate" (p. 157) for Whites and Indians, but very incomplete for Blacks. Estimates of total mortality range from 139,471 to 511,726; Phillips plumps for about 300,000 (p. 178), giving a death rate of 43.9 per 1000, one of the half-dozen highest worldwide. This book is likely to remain the definitive work on this pandemic for South Africa. But it also highlights the need for more comparative work and a fresh survey to replace those by Richard Collier and Al Crosby (the latter, published in 1976, has also just been reprinted without revision). A preoccupation with weapons, technology and grand strategy, argue Terry Copp and Bill McAndrew, has led historians to ignore the human dimension of battle. Making use of recent research into what has become known as "battleshock", the authors examine the reactions of Canadian Army troops to the circumstances of combat and military life. Their primary concern, however, is to chart military and medical attempts to deal with battle exhaustion and other "psychiatric" problems among conscript soldiers. Copp and McAndrew are critical of military men who emphasized discipline over psychiatric treatment, and of Canadian army psychiatrists who viewed battle exhaustion as a personality disorder rather than a symptom of acute stress to which anyone was liable. They are sympathetic to those psychiatrists in the field who helped develop more humane and appropriate methods of diagnosis and treatment. Leading Canadian army neuropsychiatrists were confident that most psychiatric …