Railway spine

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Railway spine was a nineteenth-century diagnosis for the post-traumatic symptoms of passengers involved in railroad accidents.

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".

Railway collisions were a frequent occurrence in the early 19th century. Exacerbating the problem was the fact that railway cars were flimsy, wooden structures with no protection for the occupants.

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 rejected these claims as fake.

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.

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.