historyanalysisNLM Circulating Now1918–1919 · Europe
‘Barbed-wire disease’ during the First World War
During and after the First World War, the Swiss physician Adolf Lukas Vischer argued that men held in prisoner-of-war and internment camps for two years or more developed a distinct mental illness: apathy about life outside the wire, restlessness and an inability to concentrate. He called it 'barbed-wire disease' in his 1918 book Die Stacheldrahtkrankheit. He claimed it was a universal response to captivity, caused by the confinement itself and not by a prisoner's background, with severity rising with the length of captivity. The idea was compared to the strain felt by polar explorers, but it never gained the standing of 'shell shock' in medical circles.
Vischer's theory rested on his observations of prisoners across several countries: Switzerland, Turkey, the Isle of Man and British camps. He concluded that the stress of confinement, boredom, loss of control and uncertainty produced the same withdrawal in nearly everyone who stayed long enough. Because he saw it as a shared human response, he treated it as a medical condition rather than a sign of weakness or criminality.
The idea shows how war changed the understanding of mental health, from shell shock at the front to the psychological damage of captivity. Critics argued that the term took away local ways of understanding melancholy, such as the French notion of cafard, and that the reform of prisons was more concerned with the comparison to 'stir-crazy' than with the men themselves.
Similar ideas of captivity-driven breakdown reappeared later, including studies of prisoners of war in the Second World War and the research on the psychological effects of isolation in solitary confinement. Each time, doctors struggled to decide whether the damage came from the individual or the environment.
U.S. National Library of Medicine
Illustrative photo · Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
