The North Platte Semi Weekly Tribune

Now, we often hear of obscure nervous derangements with no clear cause following railway accidents, and of strange nervous symptoms complicating such obvious physical injuries as may occur, and many questions are apt to be raised as to the possibility of such phenomena being due to any known degree of concussion or injury of the nervous centers, and not infrequently much doubt is thrown on the bona fides of plaintiffs in such cases.

While, however, quite admitting the frequency with which fraud is at the bottom of claims against railway companies, it does not do to forget that something else besides mere physical injury may result from a railway accident. If terror, a sudden and intense horror, or, as some would say, a "mere nervous shock," without any physical injury at all, will produce long lasting changes in the mental and nervous mechanism, it would be strange indeed if such changes were not found in patients who, whatever the nature or extent of their other injuries, have gone through the terrible shock of a serious railway accident.

From the moment of the first dancing on the rails, through the terrible time when passengers and portmanteaus are being tossed helplessly about, up to the moment when, with a final crunch, all becomes still, may not be a long time: but, short as it is, it is a spell of the intensest agony and terror which can be conceived, and it would indeed be passing strange if it did not write deeply on many nervous systems its note of horror.

-London Hospital.