Railway spine was a nineteenth-century diagnosis for the post-traumatic symptoms of passengers involved in railroad accidents. This is the top-level page of WikiProject trains Rail tracks Rail transport refers to the land transport of passengers and goods along railways or railroads. ...

The first full length medical study of the condition was John Eric Erichsen's On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, published in 1864. For this reason, railway spine is often known as "Erichsen's disease". Sir John Eric Erichsen, 1st Baronet (19 July 1818 - 23 September 1896) was a British surgeon, born in Copenhagen, was the son of Eric Erichsen, a member of a well-known Danish family. ...

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.

The nature of symptoms caused by "railway spine" was hotly debated in the late 19th century. German physicians claimed that all railway spine symptoms were due to physical damage to the spine or brain, whereas French and American scholars, notably Jean-Martin Charcot, insisted that some symptoms could be caused by hysteria. Categories: People stubs | French physicians | 1825 births | 1893 deaths | History of medicine ...

Erichsen observed that those most likely to be injured in a railway crash were those sitting with their backs to the acceleration. This is the same injury mechanism found in whiplash. Whiplash is the result of impulsive stretching of the spine, often the result of a rear-end collision between cars or trucks. ...

External links

• The railway accident: trains, trauma and technological crisis in nineteenth-century Britain