The cultural construction of war and mental trouble: World War I veterans, masculinity and psychiatry at St. Elizabeth's Hospital

This dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which military medicine, the U.S. government, and the American public understood and attempted to contain the practical and symbolic threats posed by mental illness among veterans during the First World War. Through an examination of veterans' medical files institutionalized at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, I argue that the medical classification and treatment of psychological injury in war, systems of welfare provision for psychologically disabled veterans, and the ways in which servicemen understood their injuries cannot be extricated from how various sets of social actors conceptualized, idealized and imagined how masculinity should be enacted in warfare and moral mandates regarding how servicemen should respond to the terrors of the battlefield. St. Elizabeth's was one institution among many where psychiatrists furthered their vision of healthy masculinity in warfare, ideas which centered on the exercise of "self-control" in the face of difficult and extreme circumstances. The psychologically disabled veteran's body was a locus of social meaning against which to measure the normative standards of militarized and racialized masculinity. In Progressive America, the disabled veteran's body was simultaneously an object of power and a public symbol of the devastating impacts of war productive of new social identities and new ways of being men.;Understanding war-related mental distress in the early twentieth century therefore leads to the problem of how to theorize the relationship between culture, warfare, medicine and power. In this dissertation, I argue that developing sociological theory about warfare requires a hermeneutic approach to the study of power. Through the case of psychologically disabled veterans at St. Elizabeth's, I examine the multiple logics of social control in which economic imperatives and political structures were deeply implicated. However, the role of culture in shaping dominant and emergent medical and political discourse and practice and in defining the logic of social action of all the actors involved cannot be underestimated. My approach is to study power at St. Elizabeth's through its internal ritualized interactions, its overlapping relationships with other powerful institutions, and the symbols and myths emanating from the hospital that communicated and affirmed normative social identities.