Lecture by Rebecca Ayako Bennette
On 9 December 2021, from 16h to 17h30 (CET/Brussels time) historian Rebecca Ayako Bennette (Middlebury College, USA) will give an online lecture titled ‘Diagnosing Dissent: German soldiers, military psychiatry, and patient agency in World War One.’ You are all welcome to attend this lecture. Please register here. You will receive the link after registration.
This lecture is part of the KU Leuven Health Humanities Lecture Series 2021-2022, which focuses on ‘patient agency’.
Abstract: Bennette’s new interpretation of military psychiatry in Germany during World War I demonstrates that contemporary doctors were neither as dismissive of the traumatizing effects of modern warfare nor as brutal in their approach to afflicted soldiers as historians have commonly believed. This not only affected the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers but also impacted how even overt forms of disobedience and opposition like desertion and conscientious objection were handled. Instead of criminalizing these soldiers, as was commonly the case in other countries, the German system medicalized them, allowing for far more space for dissent within the military. Soldiers used this space created within the practice of military psychiatry to assert patient agency, despite the uneven playing field with which they had to contend.
Bio: Rebecca Ayako Bennette received a BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MA and PhD from Harvard University. She is author of Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification (Harvard University Press, 2012) and Diagnosing Dissent: Hysterics, Deserters, and Conscientious Objectors in Germany during World War One (Cornell University Press, 2020). She is a professor of history at Middlebury College in Vermont, USA.
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