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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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leader and you could get a great deal of specific work done. If he had gone into this area, especially with the breakthrough in the use of Serpasil and Thorazine and numerous other tranquilizing drugs for both severe manic and schizophrenic patients, he could have promoted this in a wonderful way.

As the drugs are used, as we've said, in the treatment of disease, the fear and mystery have lessened and people are given hope. And up until the time of these drugs, there really had not been any hope in severe mental illness. Now, this is curious because in certain specific kinds of mental illnesses there had been some very major victories, but nobody seemed to have any hope for the rest of the severely mentally ill. Over the last 20 years the use of Niacin had eliminated pellagra as a cause of people having to go to state hospitals, and this, of course, was mainly due to malnutrition in the South, and then the use of penicillin decreased markedly the number of people with paresis entering the mental hospitals. You remember that paresis is the end result of syphilis.

But up until 1954 no single drug was useful for any form of schizophrenia and only lobotomies and electroshock were of any avail to control some of the more violently ill patients in state mental hospitals, and these were forms of thereapy, especially lobotomy, which were very severe and in the case of lobotomy irreversible, and electroshock was rejected by many patients.

Q:

What about the use of insulin shock?





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