"Medicinable Literature": Bibliotherapy, Literary Caregiving, and the First World War.

Histories of bibliotherapy often emphasize the importance of the First World War in stimulating the development of bibliotherapeutic theory and practice. The word itself was used in a 1916 article by the American author Samuel McChord Crothers, while histories of bibliotherapy in the United Kingdom often foreground H. F. Brett-Smith's so-called "fever chart" of therapeutic books for treating shell-shocked soldiers. Despite this, however, we argue that a full account of wartime bibliotherapy (particularly the importance of British hospital libraries in its development) has yet to be told. This article draws on the papers of British military hospital personnel to describe the range of "literary caregiving" supporting the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers during the conflict. It traces the social and professional networks underlying these schemes. Finally, it shows how British volunteer librarians helped develop a specifically medicalized language of caregiving through books, thereby contributing to the early development of bibliotherapy.

Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library.

This article is about the relationship between reading, trauma and responsive literary caregiving in Britain during the First World War. Its analysis of two little-known documents describing the history of the War Library, begun by Helen Mary Gaskell in 1914, exposes a gap in the scholarship of war-time reading; generates a new narrative of "how," "when," and "why" books went to war; and foregrounds gender in its analysis of the historiography. The Library of Congress's T. W. Koch discovered Gaskell's ground-breaking work in 1917 and reported its successes to the American Library Association. The British Times also covered Gaskell's library, yet researchers working on reading during the war have routinely neglected her distinct model and method, skewing the research base on war-time reading and its association with trauma and caregiving. In the article's second half, a literary case study of a popular war novel demonstrates the extent of the "bitter cry for books." The success of Gaskell's intervention is examined alongside H. G. Wells's representation of textual healing. Reading is shown to offer sick, traumatized and recovering combatants emotional and psychological caregiving in ways that she could not always have predicted and that are not visible in the literary/historical record.