Summary

How does the body remember? Doctors began treating tens of thousands troops (those who were not shot by their own comrades for failing to perform their duties) who could not stop performing compulsive and repetitive gestures. They called it shell shock, named for the new modern warfare which deployed concussive explosives against waves of men pouring from the trenches. What they couldn’t help observing was the work of the second kind of memory, the mémoire, a kind of wild memory expressed across the entire body. A visual essay in three parts.