It took one hundred years, from the time it was first recognized as a syndrome among hysterical women in the late 1800s to its inclusion in 1980 as a diagnosis in the manual of the American Psychiatric Association, for posttraumatic stress disorder to be recognized as a legitimate illness. (Herman 12, 28) Victims were psychologically inclined to mask and forget their awful experiences, and society at large preferred not to contemplate the subject of atrocity if it could be helped. Three times, however, in one century, the victims were so numerous and their trauma so documentable that society could not ignore their suffering - World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. (Herman 9) Many military and civilian doctors blundered horribly in their attempts to treat the illness. Their failures allowed the illness to be forgotten each time epidemic cases following war faded, but several brilliant minds over the century continued to tussle with the problem and contribute, little by little, to the shaping of a scientific diagnosis.
The first doctors to recognize the problems caused by psychological trauma were Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud in their psychoanalysis of hysterical woman. However, their work became hopelessly bogged down by the question of whether their patients were recalling actual traumatic events or creating fantasies due to repressed sexual desires. (Herman 12-14) It wasn't until World War I and the horror brought by the "industrialization of war" (The Century) that the symptoms suffered by hysterics could be compared with the symptoms of a large number of men who had endured documentable horrors. .
Originally, young British soldiers had enlisted for the war with enthusiasm. Edward Francis, a British WWI veteran recalled, "Everyone - EVERYONE - thought the war would be over at Christmas. And they really badly wanted to get to France to get in the fighting." Another British vet, Donald Hodge, remembered, "We thought it was going to be a tremendous lark to knock the Kaiser off his throne, you see.