Anna Elisabeth Gehl (Freie Universität Berlin)
The Military Welfare History Network held its second symposium at Birmingham University on the 6th and 7th of November 2025. The conference was funded through the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the Social History of Medicine and is part of a three-part series, two of which were held in 2025 with the third being a hybrid conference that will be held in 2026 (https://militarywelfarehistory.com/wellcome/ ). Paul Huddie and Michael Robinson must be thanked for their tireless work in organising these fantastic opportunities to meet and connect with others in the field in such a small and intimate framework. The SSHM enabled me to travel to the conference through their bursary programme for Early Career Scholars, so I would like to thank them for this chance.
The title of the symposium was “War, Trauma and Emotional Injury.” There were five panels with topics ranging from ‘short and long-term trauma,’ to ‘writing trauma’ and ‘emotional distress.’ There were twelve speakers and two keynote speakers, and the papers covered vast territories and subjects, ranging from the ancient world to the Yugoslav wars, from Japan, Australia and Ukraine, to Post-Brexit Britain.
Despite the breadth and scope, both in time and geographical location of the papers’ focus, there were overarching themes which emerged and which led to lively discussions. The first theme, especially highlighted by Owen Rees’ keynote ‘Navigating the ancient world with modern diagnoses,’ was on the tendency among some non-historians (and some historians) to use PTSD to explain the behaviours of past actors in wars in times before PTSD was an official diagnosis. The second, brought into focus through Eri Nakamura’s presentation of the psychological traumas of imperial Japanese soldiers in the period after the defeat, as well as Robert Dale’s paper on treating trauma in Ukrainian veterans of the ‘Great Patriotic War,’ was on how the expression of trauma is steeped in the culture and location in which it takes place.
On the first evening we met up for a joint dinner at the Edgbaston Hotel restaurant for more vibrant talk over good food and beer.
The next day we kicked off with a panel on short and long-term trauma, followed by a panel of which two papers were on women’s traumatic experiences of the First World War (Delaney Beck and Nichola Nash). As my PhD is on ‘Female Gentlemen: World War One, Shell Shock and the Women Who Volunteered’ I was honoured to chair this panel. The third paper on this panel was again an unusual one, focussing as it did on British soldiers’ ideas of nature and coping with trauma through the creation of trench gardens on the Western Front (Didier Brouns).
We were honoured to have Michael Roper as a speaker, who gave his keynote on his grandfather’s First World War experience. The keynote again picked up on what was the overarching theme of the conference: trauma before PTSD was a diagnosis. As Roper argued, his grandfather would in all likelihood have dismissed any speculation that his temper, his obsession with the goriest details of his experience and his bodily ailments, in particular those in relation to having had dysentery three times, were in any way the expression of trauma. And yet it is hard not to surmise that these were his legacies of the war and that they had their beginnings in traumatic experiences.
The expression of trauma and emotions were the main themes of two otherwise very different papers. Picking up on Michael Roper’s ideas surrounding not only primary trauma, but also intergenerational trauma, Ana Catarina Pinho showed how the traumatic legacy of Portugal’s postcolonial war has been mediated by various artists, many of whom had no direct memory of the war, while Mike Reeve talked about the use of tobacco ‘to calm the nerves’ during wartime, focussing on the embodiment of strong emotions through the quasi-medicinal practice of smoking.
The papers complemented each other wonderfully and while I could not mention them all here, they were all greatly appreciated. In the discussions that followed we concluded that while people have undoubtedly always had the capacity to be traumatised by events, these events and the expression of trauma are culturally predicated and tied to the time in which they took place. What might be traumatising for a person surviving war in ancient Greece will be different for someone during the Second World War. Similarly, the symptoms of shell shock are not the same as those of combat fatigue or PTSD, although there are overlaps.
A useful category for trauma is that of ‘moral injury’. This happens when you perpetrate, witness or are the victim of an event which is so outside of your moral compass that you find it difficult to incorporate into your belief system. Moral injury doesn’t necessarily encompass a (perceived) threat to one’s own life but could mean for instance that one’s perception of oneself as a good person has been threatened, leading to an existential crisis. This is a much more flexible category and can be usefully applied to trauma that refuses a categorisation in official diagnostics. It thereby offers a framework to describe trauma that is not PTSD, but certainly injurious.
I very much enjoyed being part of this conference and really look forward to the next one!