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Matos, P. T. de, Sardica, José Miguel & Silva, Helena (2019). War Hecatomb. International Effects on Public Health, Demography and Mentalities in the 20th Century. Bern. Peter Lang.

P. D. Matos et al.,  War Hecatomb. Int. Effects on Public Health, Demography and Mentalities in the 20th Century, Bern, Peter Lang, 2019

@book{matos2019_1714165975543,
	author = "Matos, P. T. de and Sardica, José Miguel and Silva, Helena",
	title = "",
	year = "2019",
	editor = "",
	volume = "",
	number = "",
	series = "",
	edition = "",
	publisher = "Peter Lang",
	address = "Bern",
	url = "https://www.peterlang.com/abstract/title/68300?rskey=CoPoVL&result=8"
}

TY  - EDBOOK
TI  - War Hecatomb. International Effects on Public Health, Demography and Mentalities in the 20th Century
AU  - Matos, P. T. de
AU  - Sardica, José Miguel
AU  - Silva, Helena
PY  - 2019
CY  - Bern
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/abstract/title/68300?rskey=CoPoVL&result=8
AB  - War Hecatomb. International Effects on Public Health, Demography and Mentalities in the 20th Century, offers new insights on the impact of wars (namely, but not exclusively, World War I), by underlining its social and psychological consequences, particularly in public health, demography, and mentalities in different countries. Therefore, it is not just another book on World Wars, since it does not focus primarily on political, diplomatic, military or economic aspects. Instead, the work offers a brand new approach on these wars’ consequences, and especially on the civilizational significance of the Great War of 1914-1918. This original view over societies coping with the aftermath of the two world wars reveals how states and different agents were compelled to act and to face the new post-war reality, bringing to light an innovative social agenda while simultaneously trying to cope with the overwhelming phenomenon of physically and mentally scarred multitudes of veterans and their families. The book focuses on the consequences of conflicts in different perspectives and geographic locations. In twelve chapters, several aspects and effects of wars are analysed through different lens.


Editors’ PrefaceMassive wars, born out of political radicalisms, harsh nationalisms, mis-conduct diplomacy or generalized socioeconomic strains were a key defin-ing aspect of the 20th century, in Europe and elsewhere. The path “to hell and back” (the title of one of historian Ian Kershaw’s recent books) started in 1914–1918, when the old continent was engulfed by the Great War, later to be called World War I. The overall consequences of that conflict were so  profound  and  widespread,  across  countries  and  societies,  that  there  was indeed a civilizational descend until 1945. And in the second half of the  century,  despite  the  nuclear  deterrence  of  the  Cold  War,  many  other  regional  armed  confrontations  amounted.  This  book,  entitled  War  Heca-tomb. International Effects on Public Health, Demography and Mentalities in the 20th Century, offers new insights on the impact of wars (namely, but not exclusively, World War I), by underlining its social and psychological consequences, particularly in public health, demography, and mentalities in  different  countries.  Therefore,  this  is  not  just  another  book  on  World  Wars,  since  it  does  not  focus  primarily  on  political,  diplomatic,  military  or  economic  aspects,  as  is  so  often  the  case.  Instead,  our  work  offers  a  brand new approach on these wars’ consequences, and especially on the civilizational significance of the Great War of 1914–18. This original view over societies coping with the aftermath of the two world wars reveals how states and different agents were compelled to act and to face the new post-war  reality,  bringing  to  light  an  innovative  social  agenda  while  simulta-neously trying to cope with the overwhelming phenomenon of physically and mentally scarred multitudes of veterans and their families.The  book  focuses  on  the  consequences  of  conflicts  in  different  per-spectives and geographic locations. In twelve chapters, several aspects and effects  of  wars  are  analyzed  through  different  lens.  Visible  and  invisible  wounds affected soldiers and their households with the spread of diseases and famine, for example. Other health issues, as war prisoners or eugen-ics, are also examined. The demographic consequences of armed conflicts are drawn in studies on civil demographic losses and on populations’ body weight and height. The book also reveals, through a French case-study, the new legal framework drawn back then to protect war orphans.
8 Editors’ PrefaceFollowing a chronological and thematic order, Chapter 1 is a broad-spectrum introduction to what follows. In «From innocence to harshness: the  civilizational  significance  of  World  War  I»,  José  Miguel  Sardica  underlines how this conflict created a new negative civilizational paradigm in its aftermath, paving the way for an ethos of decadence that shadowed Europe  for  years.  This  introduction  is  followed  by  other  analysis  of  the  Great  War.  In  Chapter  2, «‘Silent  Deaths’:  British  Soldier  Suicides  in  the  First  World  War»,  Simon  Walker  documents  how  suicide  was  a  common, though tragic, strategy of soldiers in the battlefield to escape the horrors of war trenches, anticipating a self-inflicted death, rather than wait-ing  to  be  killed  by  enemy  fire.  In  Chapter  3, «A  Eugenic  Legislation:  Health before, during and after the Great War in Italy», Emilia Musu-meci studies the disappointment and discussion of eugenicists due to the violence of war that was killing the strongest men.The Great War also shaped modern masculinity and femininity. The specific  case  of  gender  identities  in  Romania  is  analyzed  by  Georgeta  Fodor and Maria Tătar-Dan in Chapter 4, «‘Our Sacrifice for the Coun-try!’: War and Gender Identity in Transylvania». Next, in Chapter 5, José Manuel Sobral and Maria Luísa Lima present a study titled «Public silence: the memory of the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 in Portugal», focussing on how the war functioned as a spreader of disease worldwide, and exemplifying this using the case of the so-called “Spanish flu” and its effects in neighbouring Portugal, one of the latecomers to the conflict. With  an  unprecedented  number  of  deaths  among  soldiers,  different  forms of assistance were created, including for war orphans. The French case  is  analyzed  by  Nicolas  Todd  on  Chapter  6, «The  social  reception  of a novel legal framework for WW1 orphans: the pupille de la Nationstatus». Those men that managed to return home still had to live and cope with their war traumas. Each nation tried somehow to assist them, and in Chapter  7, «War  Trauma,  mental  health  and  social  consequences  of  World War I in Romanian Psychology and Psychiatry (1919–1939)», Oana  Habor  examines  the  Romanian  case  and  the  contributions  there  given  to  the  progress  of  psychiatrics  and  psychology.  As  Sílvia  Correia  shows  in  Chapter  8, «“(In)complete  Citizens”:  First  World  War  Por-tuguese  Disabled  Soldiers  and  the  Construction  of  Group  Identity», these citizen-soldiers tried to return to civic life in the post-war but were not always able to do so, demanding to be recognized as war victims, in a 
Editors’ Preface 9struggle both for physical and symbolic healing, not easy to attain in the years immediately following the armistice of 1918. The First World War had a harsh impact on civilians and demography, as  the  Austrian  case-study  reveals.  Working  on  this  national  case,  Peter  Teibenbacher’s Chapter  9, «War,  Peace  and  times  of  transition:  Civil  demographic losses in Austria during WWI and “recovery” until 1938. An  international  and  intraregional  comparison»,  makes  an  extensive  appraisal  of  the  births  and  deaths  losses  in  Austria  comparatively  with  other countries in the interwar period.Despite  the  end  of  the  First  World  War,  peace  was  not  a  reality  for  all  countries.  After  the  armistice,  other  conflicts  took  place,  as  between  Greece and the Ottoman Empire. In Chapter 10, «For the protection of public health: Prisoners of War and Refugees in Quarantine on Saint-George  Island,  1922–1925»,  Anastasios  Zografos  examines  the  import-ant measures taken by the Greek government to avoid an epidemic crisis following the country’s defeat and the return of thousands of war prisoners and refugees. The aftermath of World War II also had an enormous effect over  population’s  health,  allowing  for  comparisons  of  cohorts  a  genera-tion apart. Chapter 11, «The impact of the Second World War on the young  Polish  population»,  authored  by  Grażyna  Liczbińska,  Zbigniew  Czapla, Janusz Piontek and Robert M. Malina, focus on the specific case of Poland during this conflict, revealing how famine then endured had a lasting impact on the population height and weight. Chapter 12, «Warfare in the 19th-20th Centuries and Its Effects: A  Necessary  Evil?  (Case  Study:  World  War  I)»,  by  Ioan  Bolovan  and  Sorina Paula Bolovan, closes the volume here offered. They do draw major conclusions on war consequences throughout the contemporary age, in a text that serves as a final reflection on the major issues tackled all along the book. Carrying  a  transnational  approach  that  fosters  comparative  studies  on countries so often neglected by mainstream historiography, War Hec-atomb. International Effects on Public Health, Demography and Mentali-ties in the 20th Century is therefore aimed at academics and researchers. It can be of interest not only to those working on wars and society, but also to those with interest on demography, history of health and mentalities at large,  through  specialized  and  wider  audiences  curious  on  20th  century  social history and war studies.
10 Editors’ PrefaceThis book is partially an output of an international conference, held in  the  NOVA  University  of  Lisbon,  in  Portugal,  in  June  2017,  entitled  War  Hecatomb,  and  organized  within  an  ongoing  funded  research  pro-ject on Medical and Healthcare services in the First World War: the case of the Portuguese soldiers during and after the Great War (1914–1960)1. Some  of  the  papers  there  presented  were  enlarged  and  transformed  into  the chapters herewith included; and the Editors invited other colleagues, whose  work  we  believed  would  fit  the  scope  of  this  book,  to  contribute  with  their  specialized  research  work.  This  dynamic  has  already  led  to  a  second  edition  of  the  War  Hecatomb  international  conference,  this  time  held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in June 2018 – and will perhaps allow for a new book publishable in a near future. The Editors are obviously grateful to the Contemporary History Insti-tute (IHC) and to the Humanities Research Centre (CHAM), both belong-ing  to  the  NOVA  University  of  Lisbon,  for  all  the  institutional  support  given  to  the  abovementioned  research  project  and  conferences,  and  for  their generous financial contribution towards the publication of this book. An acknowledgement is also due to the Portuguese Commission for Mili-tary History, a governmental organization within the Portuguese Ministry of Defence, which became interested in this volume and also sponsored it.Of the three Editors of the book, one is also a chapter author. Besides our joined efforts, this book would not have been possible without the sci-entific contribution presented by the other seventeen colleagues involved in it, academics who worked closely with us, authoring their texts, review-ing  them  and  offering  the  community  sound  historical  work.  The  manu-script was lucky enough to be accepted by the prestigious academic pub-lisher Peter Lang. And thus, a warm thanking should also be given to all those who assisted the Editors at Peter Lang, especially Jana Habermann and Thomas Lemaître, who took care of all the bureaucratic and editorial tasks needed to produce and publish this book. Thank you, also, to Prof. Michel Oris, the coordinator of Peter Lang’s series Population, Famille et Société, the collection of which this book now takes part in, for accepting this contribution and for the support also given to us. Lastly, the Editors wish to pay tribute to Prof. Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux for her advice and encouragement throughout the year
ER  -