What Was Done to the Brain

Psychiatry cured one disease outright, by giving people malaria. Everything that followed — the comas, the convulsions, the ice pick — was an attempt to repeat it.

A course on the thought of Treatment.

Psychology · Medicine

What you will learn

• Identify which widely-held beliefs about Walter Freeman are false.
• Explain why a family could not know what had been done to a relative.
• State what the course means by saying the cartoon is easier than the record.
• State what general paresis was and roughly what share of admissions it accounted for.
• Trace fever therapy from an 1883 observation to a treatment.
• Explain how one real cure changes what a profession will attempt next.
• Describe insulin coma therapy and the reasoning behind it.
• Explain what Cerletti learned at the slaughterhouse and why it mattered.

Course outline

1. The Brother Who Did Not Know — A writer sat in a Minneapolis living room in 1996 opposite an elderly man talking about his brother Richard, institutionalised in the 1930s and dead at seventy-two. Most of what the public knows…
2. The One Bet That Paid — General paresis filled the asylums and killed everyone it took. A Viennese physician who had failed to get a job in internal medicine cured it by infecting patients with malaria, and won a Nobel…
3. The Man From Termini Station — Insulin took patients to the edge of death and brought them back. Metrazol terrified them. The solution to the terror came from a Rome slaughterhouse, and the first person it was tried on was a…
4. A Milestone and a Warning, in One Diary Entry — The Yale physiologist whose primate work the operation rested on wrote in his diary that he had seldom been more stirred — and in the same entry hoped the men doing it would stay away from the…
5. Nine Minutes, Seven, Four, Two — Freeman hired a psychologist to measure what the operation did. She timed how long patients would talk about themselves. The series she got is the clearest account of the cost that anybody produced…
6. Forced Into Retirement — Chlorpromazine did what none of it had done, and the psychiatrist who recognised what it was ended his career in disgrace rather than in Stockholm. The reason is the year the next course opens in.

Terms introduced

general paresis, fever therapy, insulin coma, convulsive therapy, psychosurgery, transorbital lobotomy, self-regarding span, chlorpromazine

Part of the Simposeum course library.