The First World War may be considered a dramatic watershed in popularly received notions of masculinity and military medicine in Britain. Informed largely by the imperial imaginary of enterprise and endeavour and manufactured through the discourses of Boy Scouts and public schools, pre-war British masculinity had its most hegemonic representation in the ‘strong and silent’ strand, trained against exhibiting emotions and all that characterised the ‘sissy’. As Julia Grant argues in her astute analysis of the paradigm shift in the politics of turn-of-thecentury British masculinity:

A significant shift in dominant notions and practices of manliness and military medicine in post-First-World-War Britain may largely be attributed to the phenomenon of shell shock, which intrigued neurologists and civilians alike. As a pseudo-medical term as well as a social pejorative, shell shock enacted an ironic inversion of the gendered construct of hysteria, a condition that had historically been classified as a female malady rooted in the uterus.

In her study of masculinity crisis in the early twentieth century Sandra Gilbert examines how the structural similarities between the claustrophobic domestic space and the closed trenches of the First World War brought the hysteric and repressed Victorian female into problematic proximity with the nervous male soldier of the First World War. In a similar vein, Eric Leed argues how the doctors of the combatants realised that the ‘symptoms of shell shock were precisely the same as those of the most common hysterical disorders of the peacetime, though they often acquired new and more dramatic names in War …. What had been predominantly a disease of women before the War became a disease of men in combat.’