In 1916, two years into the Great War, the building was requisitioned by the British Government and turned into a military hospital for the treatment of neurasthenia, a condition better known to us now as shell shock. During its time as Craiglockhart War Hospital, the building was a temporary home to some 150 British officers sent there to be treated for neurasthenia. It was here in the August of 1917 that the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon first met. In terms of poetic output, the few months that both these men were to spend at Craiglockhart was to prove a productive time.
