The Science Service, a news agency for the popularization of science, was established in 1921 by newspaper magnate, E.W. Scripps and scientist William E. Ritter. In 1929 the Service hired a young female writer, Marjorie Van de Water, to cover social science for its Science News-Letter and other Science Service publications. Van de Water focused much of her writing on psychology, including stories about wartime stress, the plight of the “fighting man,” and the condition we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. During World War II, researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychology and psychiatry began to promote new attitudes toward soldiers with service-related psychiatric conditions. Van de Water articulated these new attitudes in articles and books about the psychology of American G.I.’s. A five-article series, written by Van de Water “to understand and help the returning soldier discharged for neuropsychiatric reasons,” ran in the April 22, 1944 issue of The Science News-Letter and was picked up by newspapers reaching 2-3 million readers. Van de Water’s humane consideration of the psychological concerns of soldiers, in the battlefield and back home, paved the way for the public to understand that stress disorders were not moral failings, that soldiers sometimes returned from war “wounded in mind” and that many of these soldiers could return to productive, satisfying lives if they received proper treatment. This paper briefly examines the evolution of our scientific understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and places Van de Water’s writings on the topic in their historical context.
