2015 marks several important First World War anniversaries: the centenary of the first use of poison gas in January; the centenary of the Gallipoli landings and the Armenian genocide in April. It is also 100 years since The Lancet published Charles S. Myers’ article, A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock.

The study of shell shock

A person's experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children's lives, new work is showing.

Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders.

Many researchers assume that the continuing influences of the Holocaust on its survivors are long-term, and hypothesize that its stamp is also present in the lives of the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors (e.g., Shmotkin et al., 2011). This assumption notwithstanding, controlled studies have found that second-generation Holocaust survivors do not report more psychopathology (e.g., Van IJsendoorn et al., 2003).

I wish to introduce the topic of racial consciousness with some words about a Dutch author born in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies: Hella S. Haasse. When she passed away in September 2011 at the age of 93, all obituaries affirmed she wasone of the most-respected and admired modern novelists, whose vivid and lively evocations of life in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies have...