Abstract Summary
The common tale about the “chemical revolution” in psychiatry is that it begins with the introduction of neuroleptics in the 1950s. The latter led, as most historians argue, to the dismantling of mental asylums: patients suffering from mental illnesses were increasingly treated as out-patients. This paper starts from a different standpoint. It discusses a series of works that were published in an era that predates the so-called “chemical revolution”: the first half of the twentieth century. The paper argues that the foundation of chemical interpretations of mental illness (and pharmacological treatment) was laid in the interwar period within clinical and experimental studies with mescaline. Research on the alkaloid mescaline, extracted from peyote and first synthesised in 1919, focused from the early twentieth century on possible analogies between mescaline intoxication and psychosis. This led to claims that biochemical or hormonal imbalances were the cause of mental illness (illustrated in particular with the example of schizophrenia and the so-called "m substance" in 1952). Focusing on published works by psychiatrists and neuroscientists (i.e. John Raymond Smythies, Humphrey Osmond, Roland Fischer, Kurt Beringer, Heinrich Klüver), the paper highlights the determinant role that biochemistry played for brain-centered explanations of mental illness, and conceptions of personality. It furthermore discusses how the senses (in particular eyesight) were examined in experiments to further the clinical association between mescaline intoxication and schizophrenia
