Transcript

ANNIKA MOMBAUER

Welcome to World War I, Trauma and Memory. I’m Annika Mombauer, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the Open University. And I’ll be your guide over the next three weeks. The First World War was a war of unprecedented scale and brutality. Over the next three weeks, you will discover just how devastating the effects of the war were. You’re going to study the subject of physical and mental trauma, such as shell shock, who was affected by it, and how was it treated. You will also examine the effect this had on civilian populations and how trauma has been represented in art and literature since. This week you will focus on physical and mental casualties of the war.

First of all, you will learn about physical casualties by looking at the death rates and overall casualty rates across the combatant nations. You will also consider issues such as facial disfigurement and loss of limbs, which were encountered on an unprecedented and unexpected scale and posed new challenges to medical professionals.