Malingering

“If malingering were cast as a psychological condition it could serve as a means both of asserting medical authority and of gaining professional autonomy in the face of the military’s employment of doctors as mere medical police. Doctors might thereby extricate themselves from positions which, via-á-vis the military, were parallel those of malingerers in their relation to medical officers. In effect, through psychologization, the malingerer’s use of his body in the struggle against military power, as well as the medical profession’s relations with the military, could be depoliticized, or at least removed from the space of medical jurisprudence (Cooter, 132). . . . [But] the practical effect of modernity’s embrace of malingering is not widely apparent. . . The court-martialling of malingerers continued apace during the war. From the military’s point of view, the medicalization of malingering could only serve to encourage it and run up demands on war pensions (136). . . . rank-and-file doctors at the front . . . tended to respond to malingering not as a treatable pathology, but in terms of personal cowardice . . . among rank-and-file medical officers, as opposed to the elite psychologically-inclined ones, the encounter with malingers might be demedicalized. . . . [GPs, resentful of the state’s use of doctors as salaried servants and third-party medical detectives] took up what might well be described as an anti-modernist position, at the heart of which was the trope of the sacred voluntary relationship between doctors and patients (138, 139). . . . [-Among GPs] psychological modernism was not embraced, and neither were any standardizing routines. For the most part, malingering was managed paternalistically on an individual informed basis, essentially in reaction to the managerial forces of modernity, and in disdain of psychological expertise. If malingering in modernity signifies rebellion against industrial disciplines and routines, then GPs and malingerers had much in common” (140).