"In spite of severe headache, vomiting and disorder of micturition, he remained on duty for more than two months. He then collapsed altogether after a very trying experience, in which he had gone out to seek a fellow officer and had found his body blown to pieces, with head and limbs lying separated from his trunk."

This description of a World War I officer suffering from horrific nightmares was written by the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers in his classic study, "The Repression of War Experience," published in The Lancet medical journal in 1918.

As well as a master of understatement, Rivers was a pioneer in the recognition and treatment of "shell shock," a condition that would now be classified as a type of post-traumatic stress disorder. Among many others, Rivers treated the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, gradually helping them to come to terms with what they had witnessed.