ABSTRACT
The ®rst clinical effects of antipsychotic drugs were reported in 1951 by a French surgeon, Henri Laborit, who tried chlorpromazine (4560 RP) in patients in order to ®nd speci®c forms of anesthesia that he called `hibernation' (Laborit and Huguenard, 1951). These ®ndings were followed up by the seminal report by Delay et al. (1952) showing that chlorpromazine reduced psychotic symptoms, in particular excitation and agitation symptoms, in a heterogeneous sample of patients with mixed psychotic and manic symptoms. These early observations were veri®ed by subsequent controlled studies that convincingly demonstrated the ef®cacy of this class of drugs, especially in reducing productive psychotic symptoms and the risk of new psychotic episodes in schizophrenia (Casey et al., 1960; Davis et al., 1980).
