Word: metrazol
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Results of early treatment by analysis were only tentative. But then came insulin and metrazol, and now, in the last two years, have come two new drugs, chlorpromazine and reserpine, which are making thousands of supposedly hopeless cases of schizophrenia accessible to analytic techniques...
...native Budapest, Dr. von Meduna was one of the first to use shock treatment (with the drug Metrazol) for psychoses. He tried carbon dioxide with no success. Soon after he settled in Chicago in 1939 (and dropped the "von"), Dr. Meduna decided that psychoses were too deep-seated to reach with carbon dioxide. But neuroses offered him a promising field...
...serious psychoses, shock (electric, insulin or metrazol) is sometimes effectively used to jolt depressed psychotics back to normal. Some psychiatrists admit that electric shock superficially resembles the medieval torture of the insane. (The beatings that the insane used to get, with chains, whips or rods, may actually have helped them, no matter what the intent.) The modern version is applied with more humanity, no more understanding of what makes it work. But patients who are so sick that they cannot talk at all may be able to talk after shock. Psychiatrists try to use such brief lucid periods to start...
They Mystify. The Commission made no report on metrazol and electric shock treatment, because they are too new to permit thorough follow-up studies. Both have the advantage that they take less time per treatment than insulin shock (electric shock is the cheapest type) and do not require watching a patient's every breath for hours - insulin shock patients may go into irreversible shock and fatal convulsions. Both metrazol and electric shock have the disadvantage that the "fits" they produce are violent and may cause a patient to hurt himself. As many as half the metrazol patients used...
...Richard C. Gill brought back a big supply of curare from the jungles, hoping it would help spastic paralysis (TIME, July 22, 1940). It was not much help, because its effects are transient. But doctors soon began to use curare to pre vent bone breaking in metrazol shock treatments for insanity...