Intellectual Property

While taking a bath one Sunday in 1953, Heinz Lehmann read a Rhône-Poulenc pamphlet for a new sedative, chlorpromazine. The Montreal psychiatrist was skeptical of the French pharmaceutical company’s sales pitch, which touted the drug as a “chemical lobotomy” that could calm hallucinations. But he was no stranger to high-risk research. He had been performing psychiatric experiments and clinical trials for almost two decades as the medical director of the Verdun, a “cash-strapped” public asylum that had become, in 1946, McGill University’s largest teaching hospital. Over the years, he had used two types of shock therapy: insulin coma therapy and electric convulsive therapy. He had even injected sulphur, typhoid antitoxin, turpentine, and malaria into some patients, and occasionally he tested potential treatments on himself. With his usual curiosity, he began a trial of chlorpromazine just two weeks later to explore its “full therapeutic range.”

Quoting Lehmann’s...