My research project began with an essay[1] given to me by Tracy that highlighted the ways writing by medical personnel can be interpreted and basically directed me towards my research topic, which was still rather broad at that time.
What encouraged me to view my research topic through the lenses of gendered expectations was an article by Mark Humphries[2]. I am one of those people guilty of using highlighter in books and even though it was a book I had gotten from the library which meant I wasn’t able to highlight anything in it, there were so many passages that simply spoke to me and helped me connect all those dots in my head to a coherent picture.
When I started my paper, I thought I would be concentrating on women’s experiences because they had to find their way in a world formerly and still dominated by men. But during my research I decided to rather focus on the experiences of males because in my opinion, the shift and the divisions in traditional ways of thinking about masculinity were more striking to me in connection to the course topic of gender in connection to health. After all, men’s experiences of shell-shock were inextricably linked with the gendered expectations constructed by society and that were taken up by the medical authority which proved to be especially fatal for traumatised soldiers.
For the future, I am hoping to be able to use this research project as part of the work for my bachelor’s thesis in British Studies, which is my major at my home university. I would love to include some more research on European soldiers and their experiecnes of war and trauma and the responses they received in order to find out if the gendered expectations were universally accepted and therefore amanged to influence the ways the medical authority handled dealing with traumatised war veterans.
What I would love to intgerate further are the literary approaches I have hinted at in this paper because I would love to concentrate further on the ways literature can not only shape our own minds and help as a way to overcome or deal with trauma, but in how far they can stimulate responses in the reader’s minds. This is why this summer semester, I am going to take courses in a joint-project between my home university and their teaching hospital which is called “Empirical Aesthetics” and is going to explore the ways literature affects our brain activity and other parts of our own physical and mental health.
I can’t wait to explore this topic further and am very grateful for the different approaches this research project has given me to explore the topic further.
[1] Carol Acton and Jane Potter, “’These frightful sights would work havoc with one’s brain’: Subjective Experience, Trauma and Resilience in First World War Writings by Medical Personnel,” Literature and Medicine, no 30, 1 (Spring 2012): 61-85.
[2] Mark Humphries. „War’s Long Shadow: Masculinity, Medicine and Gendered Experience of Trauma, 1914-1939.” The Canadian Historical Review, 91, 3 (September 2010): 503-31.
