In formal Japanese, I'm told, the word 'trauma' is written as a compound of two Chinese characters: one meaning 'external' and the other 'injury'. Trauma is thus a hurt on the outside, as in ancient Greek - a wound. We still use the word in this way when we speak of 'trauma surgeons' or 'trauma wards', but this is not the sense that has made it so resonant and ubiquitous today. Having once been relatively obscure, it is now found everywhere: used in the New York Times fewer than 300 times between 1851 and 1960, it has appeared 11,000 times since.

LRB 8 July 2010 | PDF Download