Terra incognita: an historiographic approach to the first chlorpromazine trials using patient records of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg.

Viola Balz

Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Charité Berlin, Ziegelstrasse 5-9, 10117 Berlin, Germany. viola.balz@charite.de

History of psychiatry 2011 Jun

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Psychiatrists have often referred to the discovery of new psychopharmaceutical drugs in the 1950s as a 'therapeutic revolution', which allowed physicians to observe und measure therapeutic effectiveness easily. Contrary to this view, this article will argue that psychiatrists needed the patient's subjective voice to evaluate the effects of the drugs. In a micro-analysis of hospital records of the first patient to be treated with chlorpromazine in the Heidelberg clinic in 1953, I show the different perspectives of doctors and patients on the diagnosis and treatment.The analysis points up how difficult it was to get an impression of the drug's effectiveness.The article emphasizes the importance of the new perspective that includes the patient's voice in the history of psychotropic drugs after 1945.

Citation

Viola Balz. Terra incognita: an historiographic approach to the first chlorpromazine trials using patient records of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg. History of psychiatry. 2011 Jun;22(86 Pt 2):182-200