Doroshow, Deborah Blythe (Author)
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume: 62
Pages: 213--243
Most historians of psychiatry regard insulin coma therapy (ICT) either as an embarrassing stumble on the path to modern biological psychiatry or as one member of a long line of somatic therapies used to treat mental illness in the mid-twentieth century. This article explores the ICT era, roughly 1933--60, as a key moment in the development of American psychiatry. Developed only ten years after insulin had been embraced as a "miracle drug" for the treatment of diabetes, ICT was perceived by psychiatrists as a means of bringing their field closer to mainstream medicine, particularly to neurology. In addition, the story of ICT reveals how a treatment never quite proven on paper was unquestionably efficacious in the local world in which it was performed. An institutionally-based treatment, ICT was administered in a specific area of the mental hospital deemed the insulin unit, a room with its own staff, practices, and attitudes toward mental illness. There, psychiatrists often experienced wondrous recoveries of individual, formerly intractable patients. These intense personal experiences allowed psychiatrists to feel truly efficacious, enabling them to reinvent themselves as medical doctors rather than behavioral and disciplinary supervisors. The confidence they derived from this capacity, along with the operating room-like setting of the insulin unit, the unit's specialized staffing and group bond, and the availability of both risk-assessment tests and a medley of treatments that countered side effects and complications, allowed ICT to be understood as an efficacious treatment for schizophrenia within the local world in which it was administered.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Sarah Phelan;
(2017)
Reconstructing the eclectic psychiatry of Thomas Ferguson Rodger
(/isis/citation/CBB992609320/)
Article
Robert Freudenthal;
Joanna Moncrieff;
(2022)
‘A landmark in psychiatric progress’? The role of evidence in the rise and fall of insulin coma therapy
(/isis/citation/CBB142072223/)
Article
Mills, John A.;
(2010)
Hallucinogens as Hard Science: The Adrenochrome Hypothesis for the Biogenesis of Schizophrenia
(/isis/citation/CBB001033694/)
Book
Missa, Jean-Noël;
(2006)
Naissance de la psychiatrie biologique: histoire des traitements des maladies mentales au XXe siècle
(/isis/citation/CBB000772828/)
Book
Anne Harrington;
(2019)
Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
(/isis/citation/CBB265847305/)
Book
Giuseppe Migliorini;
Ermanna Lazzarin;
(2022)
La schizofrenia nel pensiero di Ferdinando Barison. Profilo storico scientifico di un illustre psichiatra padovano del XX secolo
(/isis/citation/CBB361228172/)
Article
Collins, Kenneth;
(2008)
Joseph Schorstein: R. D. Laing's “Rabbi”
(/isis/citation/CBB000950365/)
Article
Carlo Maggini;
Riccardo Dalle Luche;
(2022)
An overview on Hebephrenia, a diagnostic cornerstone in the neurodevelopmental model of Schizophrenia
(/isis/citation/CBB865868388/)
Article
Daniel Mason;
Honor Hsin;
(2018)
‘A more perfect arrangement of plants’: the botanical model in psychiatric nosology, 1676 to the present day
(/isis/citation/CBB222714448/)
Article
Birk Engmann;
(2022)
On the origins of the concept of ‘latent schizophrenia’ in Russian psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB771136351/)
Article
Jonathan RT Davidson;
(2017)
Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919): Psychiatric Hospitalization and the Abduction of an American Landscape Artist
(/isis/citation/CBB229487491/)
Book
Orna Ophir;
(2022)
Schizophrenia: An Unfinished History
(/isis/citation/CBB447550162/)
Article
Passione, Roberta;
(2016)
La psichiatria di Silvano Arieti: Un primo profilo
(/isis/citation/CBB919982619/)
Article
Connor Cummings;
(2017)
The Science of Therapeutic Images: Francis Reitman, Schizophrenia and Postwar Psychiatric Art at the Maudsley and Netherne Hospitals
(/isis/citation/CBB939070327/)
Article
Evans, Bonnie;
(2014)
The Foundations of Autism: The Law Concerning Psychotic, Schizophrenic, and Autistic Children in 1950s and 1960s Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001420182/)
Article
Marina Lienhard;
(2022)
Ronald D. Laings „radical trip“. Zum Verhältnis von Psychiatrie, Anti-Psychiatrie und Wissenschaft in den 1960er Jahren [Ronald D. Laing’s “Radical Trip”. Reflection on the Relationship Between Psychiatry, Anti-Psychiatry, and Science in the 1960s]
(/isis/citation/CBB243217899/)
Book
Kieran McNally;
(2016)
A Critical History of Schizophrenia
(/isis/citation/CBB412095902/)
Chapter
Giulia Perini;
(2020)
Storia di un farmaco: la clorpromazina
(/isis/citation/CBB880659353/)
Article
Passione, Roberta;
(2018)
Psichiatria e condizione umana: Il contributo di Silvano Arieti
(/isis/citation/CBB859391750/)
Book
Michael Escamilla;
(2016)
Bleuler, Jung, and the Creation of the Schizophrenias
(/isis/citation/CBB832704528/)
Be the first to comment!