ABSTRACT
It was by chance. Let me take you back to the beginning of the story. In 1950, I was an intern in the department of Professor Delay in Sainte-Anne. I was interested in curarization and in the curare molecule. Looking back at the early work of Claude Bernard, I found that he had found that the introduction of curare, the drug which paralyses muscles, by the rectal route permitted a light curarization that allowed muscle relaxation without causing the respiratory muscles to be paralysed. He had done this in the rabbit. I repeated this study in humans using the rectal route and have a publication on it in Science - ‘Curarisation by rectal suppository’. At that time, in all publications it was standard practice to put the names of the chiefs of the department first in the list of authors. This is why the names of Professor Delay and Pichot were at the start of an article like this, whereas today they would be at the end. Our aim with infracurarization was to relax the patient. It worked to some extent. So this was an early psychopharmacology.
