In studying First World War and post-war trauma, he hopes to apply lessons to modern scenarios

An instructor from Mount Royal’s history department has been granted $38,000 for a research project into traumatic war-time experiences and how those can be used to inform the discussion of war trauma in 2009.

“People have been doing research at Mount Royal for a long time and the reality is that becoming a university is making us eligible for these types of grants.”

Mark Humphries says that instructors have been doing research at Mount Royal for a long time, and is confident that as the college transitions into a university, even more research funding will become available.

Photo: Julie C Vincent/ Calgary Journal

Humphries is confident that as MRC becomes a university, more funding will be available to acknowledge that faculty at Mount Royal have, for years, been doing research.  As an example, Humphries noted the achievement of history department chair Jennifer Petit: “She was the co-recipient of the Pierre Burton award last fall – which is the biggest national award for popularising Canadian history.”

Humphries says awards like the Standard Research Grant give Mount Royal students the advantage of access to undergrad research positions, which are valuable to employers, as Mount Royal students will have funded undergrad research experience to add to their resumes.

“If I were at many other universities in Canada the people I’d be hiring to do my research would be graduates and PhDs as opposed to undergraduates,” Humphries says, noting, “One of the advantages to coming to Mount Royal is that you have the opportunity to take part in faculty research in terms of developing skills that are marketable to employers.”

Humphries’ research project will focus on war trauma using research from World War I. He says his research isn’t designed to help soldiers overcome trauma but more, “to inform our discussion about public policy towards trauma. War is very different today than it was 90 years ago, but at the same time the experience of trauma and the experience of combat relatively stay the same. The idea that people can become traumatized by what they experience in battle is something that is transferable from the First World War to the present.

Some 20,000 soldiers of WWI were diagnosed with a variety of post-war trauma, from shell shock to operational stress injuries, to psychological and neurological injuries related to stress in the line of duty.

“We’ve done studies on how we pensioned off soldiers in general but we haven’t really looked at these trauma cases specifically. The reality is that we don’t know very much about those guys once they left the army.”

Humphries’ goal is to understand what happens to soldiers after they leave combat.

“There are some old soldiers who simply never readjust after combat and have a hard time getting back to being civilians. We haven’t done any real studies on what happened to First World War veterans,” he said.

Humphries’ research will also look at what happens to the families of affected soldiers.

Thanks to the discovery by a janitor of WWI Admission/Discharge books, uncovered in 2001 in an unused government warehouse in Ottawa, Humphries and his student researchers have access to exactly the type of records they need to begin their research. Those books, which were saved from the dust bin, had been hunted for over 80 years by Ottawa archivists.

The books, which contain records from all the hospitals that treated Canadian soldiers in the First World War, are, Humphries says, essentially ledgers containing names, service numbers, dates soldiers were admitted to hospital and what they were admitted for. Considering the 620,000 Canadian soldiers who served in WWI, without these records, finding pertinent information in general records would be a long process.

Humphries is looking at records from WWI because those records, unlike records from later wars, are now declassified and available for research.

“We can go in and look at soldiers’ personnel files; pension files; legal documents pertaining to crimes; divorces in the ‘20s and ‘30s, hospital files, treatment case files – they’re all there and they’re all open. One of the things we can get a sense of from looking at it is what exactly happens to people who are traumatized after they come back to civilian society.”

The Standard Research Grant will provide funding for four student researchers over the life of the project. One student, who has yet to be named pending a contract, will travel to Ottawa in August to begin research. Over the three years of the project up to four students will travel east to help analyze information in the newly discovered records.

Humphries has written three books, one already published and one that will be available in September; a third was co-authored with another historian. Humphries says he expects to see that book published this fall. In addition to his writing and this research project, Humphries is also working on his PhD dissertation, The Last Plague: The Spanish Influenza and the Politics of War and Health.