“In the 1920s and 1930s, trauma is still used to refer to physical trauma. The idea of trauma as a psychic wound develops a little during the Second World War, where there is talk of ‘traumatic neuroses’, but it is quite tightly defined, and is more a psychoanalytic concept than a standard psychiatric one. I have looked through issues of the Lancet and the British Medical Journal published during the Second World War, and the word trauma still has a fundamentally physical meaning. Its emergence as a psychological concept happens during the Vietnam War.”