Madness is a topic closely related to a person's nature of sanity. The idea of madness is central to the novel, Regeneration, by Pat Barker. At its simplest level, madness is the problem that plagues the soldiers at Craiglockhart War Hospital. Psychologists long to "heal" this problem. The symptoms of madness range from an inability to eat, a vocal protest of the war, to the doctors questioning of their own treatments.
Private Burns is a man at the Craiglockhart Hospital whose life is rotting away due to his madness. He experienced a very traumatic event when he was on the front line. .
He"d been thrown into the air by the explosion of a shell and had landed, .
head-first, on a German corpse, whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact. Before Burns lost consciousness, he"d had time to realize that what filled his nose and mouth was decomposing human flesh. Now, whenever he tried to eat, that taste and smell recurred. Nightly, he relived the experience, and from every nightmare he awoke vomiting (Barker 19).
During his stay at Craiglockhart, Burns could not hold down food because of his experience. Every meal he ate the food would be vomited out shortly thereafter. This reality was also his madness. Constantly seeing people in uniform was a reminder of the war just as the eating reminded him of the decomposing flesh. .
Another symptom of madness displayed was that of Siegfried Sassoon. He vocally protested the war. His protest stemmed from his conviction that the war was being needlessly prolonged, at the expense of the regular soldier, when terms of peace could have been successfully secured. This conflicted for him with his sense of duty as an officer; in staying away from the front, as a form of antiwar protest, he was abandoning the men for whose welfare he felt himself to be responsible (Whitehead 682).
Sassoon was sent to the institute because he was named insane by the bias medical board of the war.
