ABSTRACT
As with many other psychotropic drugs, lithium was discovered by serendipity. In a short essay entitled, The History of Lithium, Cade (1970) describes the background against which he made the discovery of lithium’s specific effects in bipolar illness, his working hypothesis, as well as the unexpected way in which these effects were found.
Lithium has an erratic history in medicine…The alkali itself was discovered by Arfvedson in 1817…. Lithium salts were introduced to medicine by A.B. Garrod in 1859 for the treatment of gout… Culbreth in 1927 stated that lithium bromide is the most hypnotic of all bromides. My discovery of the specific antimanic effect of lithium ion was unexpected but to be retrospectively percipient for a moment, inevitable by-product of experimental work I was doing to test a hypothesis regarding the etiology of manic depressive illness. Could mania be a state analogous to thyrotoxicosis and myxoedema, mania being a state of intoxication by a normal product of the body circulating in excess, whilst melancholia is the corresponding deprivative condition? …for this purpose guinea pigs were used and fresh urine (of manic patients) was injected intraperitonealy… it soon became evident that some specimens of urine from manic patients were far more toxic than any of control specimens from normal persons…
