Beriberi, white rice, and vitamin B: a disease, a cause, and a cure

cowardliness as well as symptoms. But what Shephard hints at but does not fully bring out is the dilemma he faces along with his subjects. On the one hand, he calls for accurate knowledge of past experience and for more facts. He thus implies that, with the full facts, the real nature of combat or post-traumatic stress disorders would become clear. On the other hand, his history repeatedly emphasizes the in-built conflict of military and healing values, a conflict in which, as he explains, "tough" and "tender" schools of opinion constantly reappear. Public opinion, maybe, wants it both ways-a position currently addressed by the fantasy of an air war in which only the enemy suffers. During past wars, doctors learned to serve military goals, and they even sometimes acknowledged that how men manage may have little to do with what doctors, working specifically as doctors, offer. In the most dramatic case, psychiatrists reported a perception that sending a man back to the front, and to likely death, might be better for his "health" than to invalid him out with his symptoms, and loss of self-respect, into an uncertain future. But in peacetime, other values come back to haunt psychiatrists, public opinion and soldiers themselves. Thus, it may be, no amount of empirical knowledge, medical or historical, will solve for us the contradiction of seeking to be humane in war.