Medicine: Air Raids Test Marriage

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A powerfully built man of 48 crouched in a London air-raid shelter, trembling and sighing like a furnace. After the all-clear, he stubbornly refused to come out. "I'm sorry, girl," he called to his wife, who was upbraiding him, "I can't 'elp it." His neighbors were all amazed by his "cowardice," for he had an excellent record in World War I.

Noted Psychiatrist Hugh Crichton-Miller did not consider this man a coward but a victim of anxiety neurosis. In the British Lancet last week he reported that the man had a father who beat his wife & children. (Said the patient: " 'e took a great 'obby in knockin' mother about.") In World War I, the patient had a chance to "retaliate" against his savage father by shooting at Germans. But in an air raid he is helpless, there is no one he can attack. Other troubles helped to break down his morale: 1) his wife; 2) infected teeth.

Physicians treating victims of air-raid neuroses, warned Dr. Crichton-Miller, must examine every detail of their patients' lives and bodies. Examples:

> Says Dr. Miller, detonation of bombs often causes definite brain injury in persons near by. But today, instead of shell shock, doctors call it blast concussion. The force of a bomb exploding may exert suction or compression on the abdomen, violently displacing fluid in the brain, sometimes ruptures tiny cerebral blood vessels. The nervous system undergoes an enormous shock, and psychological storms follow, even though the patients may be unscratched. Such mental upsets, said Dr. Crichton-Miller, have "no intrinsic connection with . . . morale, courage, discipline, or any other ethical virtue."

> Physical exhaustion may suddenly bring on mild anxiety neuroses in people with long-standing ailments. For instance, a man with anemia who fought fires all night was too tired to sleep. He was quiet, controlled, somewhat despondent. At a shelter he was given rest, food and drink. Immediately he began to tremble, broke out in a cold sweat, groaned and paced the floor.

> These air-raid neuroses are usually aggravated by other long-standing troubles. People who are happily married usually behave well under fire; those who are not break down more easily. Of all women, grandmothers do best. But old people with hardening of the arteries or other circulatory diseases are liable to get neuroses.

A severely wounded German airman, brought to a hospital in northern Britain and told that he must have a blood transfusion, protested: "I will tolerate no pollution of my Aryan blood." The doctors rounded up six of the tallest, pinkest, blondest, most "Aryan" donors they could find. Still the Nazi said he preferred death, struggled when the doctors tried to anesthetize him. He died, unpolluted.