Word: laborite
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...name, chlorpromazine is a versatile and fantastically interesting drug to medical researchers. Peppery young (38) Dr. Henri Laborit, who darts from experiment to experiment in his Paris laboratory at Val de Grâce Hospital, used the brand-new chemical on animals late in 1950. He found that it worked against shock and produced the effects of hibernation. Laborit promptly organized a research team to make the most of these effects, and from its combined efforts came the "lytic cocktail." In this, chlorpromazine is combined with Phenergari and Dolosal to block the automatic nervous system...
...Operations & Mental Cases. With physical chilling after a lytic cocktail, a patient's temperature can be dropped to 80° F. or even lower. His metabolism is slowed so sharply that even his brain needs little oxygen. French surgeons using the Laborit technique have performed hundreds of operations (for everything from heart disease and advanced cancer to a ruptured appendix) on patients rated as poor risks for ordinary anesthesia. Laborit reports no cases of surgical shock, and a good cure rate...
...Laborit found U.S. doctors the most cautious in their approach to the new drug. They are still skeptical of his lytic cocktail, and have set 80° as the lowest temperature to which a patient can be dropped without danger of heart failure. But they have found plenty of other uses for chlorpromazine. Just as it serves as a preamplifier for anesthetics, it intensifies the effect of barbiturates and narcotics. Thus, patients with unbearable pain can get along with less morphine-and, hence, less danger of becoming resistant or addicted...