POSTTRAUMATIC-STRESS-DISORDER - SUPPORTIVE EVIDENCE FROM AN 18TH-CENTURY NATURAL DISASTER

Post-traumatic stress disorder was first recognized as a diagnostic ca tegory embracing reactions in response to overwhelming environmental s tress 'outside the range of usual human experience' in DSM-III (APA, 1 980). Such abnormal stressors are by no means a product of the twentie th century but have featured, sporadically, in all societies from the earliest civilizations. Longitudinal investigations of traumatic stres s have rarely gone further back than the nineteenth century, and have been concerned. almost exclusively, with adverse effects following rai lway accidents and military combat. The present study, utilizing a mid -eighteenth century medical source, presents an analysis of the impact of a natural disaster on members of a peasant family trapped in an av alanche in the Italian Alps in 1755.