About Whiplash
Whiplash is a modern problem. While head and neck injuries certainly occurred before the invention of modern transportation, they were mostly limited to falls and the injuries of war. It was not until the invention of the train--not the automobile--that these types of injuries became common to the general population.
Train travel in the 19th century was a hazardous and potentially lethal activity. Train schedules were virtually random, telegraphs had yet to be invented and so there was no way to communicate problems on the line, and in many parts of the eastern U.S there did not even exist a standard time between different cities by which to coordinate schedules. The result was hundreds of railroad crashes. Exacerbating the problem was the fact that railway cars were flimsy, wooden structures with no protection for the occupants. Railway collisions were a common occurrence.
Soon, a group of people started coming forward who claimed that they had been injured in train crashes, but had no obvious evidence of injury. The railroads, at the time run by men seeking quick profit, rejected these claims as faked.
Some physicians, however, took the injuries seriously. In 1882, the British surgeon Dr. John Eric Erichsen authored the book Concussion of the Spine.388 In it, he wrote,
"It must, however, be evident to you all, that in no ordinary accidents can the shock, physical and mental, be so great as in those that occur on railways. The rapidity of the movement, the momentum of the persons injured and of the vehicle that carries them, the suddenness of its arrest, the helplessness of the sufferers, and the natural perturbation of mind that must disturb the bravest, are all circumstances which necessarily greatly increase the severity of the resulting injury to the nervous system, and which have led surgeons to consider these cases as somewhat exceptional and different from ordinary accidents."
Even though he did not have access to the latest high tech imaging tools...
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