I. Discoverers of
(and researchers on efficacy of) chlorpromazine:
Pierre Deniker and Jean Delay, as discoverers of the
therapeutic use of chlorpromazine, are mentioned in a number of eminent sources.
What I show below ranges from publications out from 1981 through 2001, covering
about a 20-year period, and reflecting history going back about 30 years before
1981. Among sources:
Breggin. Peter R. Breggin’s Psychiatric
Drugs: Hazards to the Brain (Springer, 1983) makes mention on pp. 12-13.
(Breggin, as it happens and related to various topics throughout this book,
uses Ross J. Baldessarini, M.D., as a reference at times; these two doctors are
Harvard-educated [Breggin] or affiliated [Baldessarini].)
Baldessarini/Goodman & Gilman’s. Most respectably, in the 2001 (10th) edition of Goodman & Gilman’s The Pharmacological
Basis of Therapeutics (New York:
McGraw-Hill Medical Publishing Division, 2001), in the article “Drugs and the
Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders[:] Psychosis and Mania,” by Ross J.
Baldessarini and Frank I. Tarazi, there is this:
“Phenothiazine compounds were synthesized in Europe in the late nineteenth century as part of the
development of aniline dyes such as methylene blue. In the late 1930s, a
phenothiazine derivative, promethazine,
was found to have antihistaminic and sedative effects. Attempts to treat
agitation in psychiatric patients with promethazine and other antihistamines
followed in the 1940s, but with little success.
“[Research on the ability of promethazine to prolong
barbiturate sleeping time, and subsequent work in its use in clinical
anesthesia,…] prompted a search for other phenothiazine derivatives with
anesthesia-potentiating actions, and in 1940-1950 [Paul] Charpentier
synthesized chlorpromazine. Soon
thereafter, [Henri] Laborit and his colleagues described the ability of this
compound to potentiate anesthetics and produce ‘artificial hibernation.’ [See
below on Neil Carlson regarding Laborit and Charpentier.] Chlorpromazine by
itself did not cause a loss of consciousness but diminished arousal and
motility, with some tendency to promote sleep. These central actions became
known as ataractic or neuroleptic soon thereafter.
“The first attempts to treat mental illness with
chlorpromazine were made in Paris
in 1951 and early 1952 by Paraire and Sigwald…. In 1952, Delay and Deniker
became convinced that chlorpromazine achieved more than symptom relief of
agitation or anxiety and that it had an ameliorative effect upon psychotic
processes in diverse disorders. In 1954, Lehmann and Hanrahan in Montreal
[these two researchers are mentioned in Breggin’s book, pp. 13-14], followed by
Winkelman in Philadelphia, reported the initial use of chlorpromazine in North
America for the treatment of psychomotor excitement and manic states as well as
schizophrenia…. Clinical studies [no particular researchers are noted] soon
revealed that chlorpromazine was effective in the treatment of psychotic
disorders of various types.” [end of subsection on the history of the drugs in
this book] (p. 486)
Carlson’s 1981 textbook. Neil R. Carlson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts in about 1981, in his
textbook Physiology of Behavior,
second edition (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1981), lists two Deniker and
Delay studies presented at the same congress in 1952:
“Le traitement des psychoses par une methode neurolytique
derivee d’hibernotheraphie […; my rough translation: “The treatment of the
psychoses by a neurolytic method derived from hibernation-type–therapy”—see three
paragraphs above for a reference to “artificial hibernation”].” This was in Comptes Rendus Congres des Medecins
Alienistes et Neurologistes de France et des Pays de Langue Francaise.
[rough translation: “Reproduced accounts [reports] of the Congress of
Psychiatrists and Neurologists of France and Francophone Countries.”] 1952,
volume 50, pp. 497-502. [accents omitted from French words; some adaptation of the
original reference’s mechanical styling is done; this title and source are also
listed in Breggin’s book noted above, but the spelling of some of the French
words is different there, maybe in error]
A second paper is noted in Carlson by the same authors: “38
cas de psychoses traitees par la cure prolongee et continuee de 4560 RP.” In Comptes… [same congress publication as
above], pp. 503-513. [Breggin does not mention this paper.]
Carlson also, in his history of the development of
antipsychotic medication, mentions (as does Baldessarini in Goodman & Gilman’s) Henri Laborit
and Paul Charpentier (p. 668); and Deniker and Delay (p. 669). In terms of
double-blind studies used for antipsychotic drugs, Carlson (p. 669) mentions
Baldessarini’s first edition of Chemotherapy
in Psychiatry (Harvard University Press, 1977) as reflecting the repeated
achievement of this, without citing other researcher names.
II. How other
antipsychotics were discovered, to ~1980
