Word: insulin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Until 1934, medical science could do very little for schizophrenia. Then Dr. Manfred Sakel of Vienna, now in Manhattan, announced that since 1928 he had been shocking schizophrenics back to sanity with large injections of insulin. In 1935, Dr. Laszlo von Meduna of Budapest successfully shocked schizophrenics with metrazol, a camphor-like drug. Psychiatrists the world over hailed this revival of the old medieval technique, enthusiastically set to work to confirm the results of their European colleagues...
Only time can prove the value of insulin shock treatment. Most patients remain sane afterwards for at least a year; others, who show no good effects immediately after treatment, may take several months to "ripen" into sanity. Best results occur in young patients, between the ages of 17 and 25. But more stable is the sanity won by persons of more mature age, who do not have to contend again with the psychic hazards of adolescence. For schizophrenia victims who have been ill more than six months, there is little hope, although obstreperous patients may become gentler, more obedient after...
...That insulin is a magic key to sanity, no psychiatrist believes. Says Dr. James Aloysius Flaherty, Dr. Strecker's young assistant: "It is carelessly gambling with a recovery hard-won to send a patient home without making real effort to stabilize the environment to which he must return or to exercise as many safeguarding precautions in planning his immediate course of action as are reasonably possible." Some doctors even press social responsibilities upon their patients in between injections, encourage them to work and play with other patients...
Before sailing for France with the 15th Canadian General Hospital contingent, Sir Frederick Grant Banting, co-discoverer of insulin, addressed in Boston the supreme council of 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Masons, predicted: "Scientists, like musicians, cannot do their work under fear of air raids and other disasters. The uncertainties of war will bottle up the products of creative minds and many of them will crack. There will be an incidence of mental disorders, because the person of highly sensitive nature will be affected...
...vitamin has some strange relationship to metabolism, for manual laborers and athletes need large quantities of C-rich foods. Another little-known fact: the vitamin mysteriously disappears from the bodies of tuberculosis patients. Victims of diabetes, when given large amounts of vitamin C, usually require smaller doses of insulin to regulate their carbohydrate metabolism...