ABSTRACT
As recounted by Caldwell (1970), the story of how schizophrenia became a treatable illness began with a French surgeon, Laborit. In the course of testing the usefulness of various compounds for combating the adverse autonomic and psychological consequences of surgery, he observed that an antihistamine, promethazine, tended to induce a state of calm, quiet, relaxation in volunteers. His attempts to maximise this effect by pharmacological manipulation resulted in the synthesis of chlorpromazine, a drug that reliably produced ‘not any loss of consciousness, not any change in the patient's mentality, but a slight tendency to sleep and, above all, disinterest for all that goes on around him’ (Laborit et al., 1952). Laborit immediately recognised the potential of this effect and managed to persuade some reluctant psychiatric colleagues to try it on psychotic patients. Successes in individual cases were quickly followed by the now classic report on a small series of patients by Delay et al. (1952).
