Britain
Charles Myers
1873–1946 Psychologist; coined 'shell shock'
Charles Samuel Myers was a Cambridge psychologist who went to France in 1914 as a volunteer doctor and became one of the first to notice that soldiers with no physical injuries could be incapacitated by war. His Lancet article of 13 February 1915 gave the condition its famous name, though he later regretted it. Appointed consulting psychologist to the British armies in France in 1916, he insisted on treating men close to the front, quickly, with rest and the expectation that they would recover. After the war he helped found the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. His career shows how a battlefield observation could become a new field of science.