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 notes, the historian Andrea Tone provides a vivid and disturbing picture of the influential experiment in McGill in History. Lehmann administered the drug to “eight nurse volunteers” and more than seventy others, most of whom had schizophrenia. “Within weeks,” Tone writes, “patients who had previously entertained no hope of recovery or discharge were symptom-free.” It became clear that this drug — originally intended for temporary use — could be one that “people took daily for life” to manage psychosis, a possibility that even Lehmann had written off as “science fiction.” The results of Lehmann’s study, published in 1954, “transfixed the medical world.” Chlorpromazine was quickly approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and taken up across North America. It became the first antipsychotic (Lehmann’s term from 1956): a class of drugs that “ended centuries of therapeutic nihilism” for doctors, relieved a strained system of mental hospitals, and has allowed many who experience psychosis to lead relatively normal lives.

Tone outlines some of the flukes that led Lehmann to this breakthrough. Had psychiatry enjoyed a better reputation within the early twentieth-century medical field, he might have found more opportunities in his native Berlin. Had he, the son of a Jewish parent, not finished his studies as Adolf Hitler was coming to power, he might have stayed in Europe despite the grim job prospects. Had he not fallen in love with a francophone woman in Canada, he might not have had the fluency to understand the Rhône-Poulenc copy that landed on his desk. Above all, Tone points out, “had contemporary research protocols existed at Lehmann’s time, his experiments, including his chlorpromazine trial, would not have proceeded as they did.”

Readers may flinch at the descriptions of Lehmann’s work, which would be viewed as unethical by any modern standard. That his notes “characterized Verdun patients and staff as willing, even eager, participants” means very little when set against current understandings of informed consent. But, as Tone suggests, these controversial methods arose out of urgency and paid off greatly. Lehmann rejected the treatments and norms that “condemned the mentally ill to a life of suffering and squalor” in hospitals. Albeit with few safety measures and no oversight, he found a way toward effective outpatient care.

Lehmann would go on to become the chair of McGill’s Department of Psychiatry, supervising trials of early antidepressants and opposing the stigmatization of “street” drugs, including cannabis. His career is often overshadowed by that of a colleague, the Scottish American doctor Donald Ewen Cameron, whose notorious connection to MKULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency mind control project, has eclipsed many accounts of the department. “This conflation is unfortunate,” writes Tone, who has taught in both the history and the psychiatry departments at McGill, “because it has caused historians to overlook other events and individuals who imparted different but equally consequential legacies.” In revisiting Lehmann’s role in the transformation of the haphazard Verdun into the prominent neurological institute it is today, the Douglas Research Centre, Tone adds a critical piece to “the unfinished restoration of McGill Psychiatry’s multi-faceted history.”

The story of the Verdun is one of many in McGill in History that are rife with contradictions and moral ambiguity. Throughout the collection of incisive essays, intellectual advancement happens in tandem with controversy, corruption, and violence. Positioned as one of the most prestigious institutions in Canada, McGill University — along with the knowledge that has stemmed from it — is revealed to be as precarious as it is powerful. From the outset, the editors are clear that this is not “a definitive or comprehensive account” of the school where they all teach (and where I studied English literature as an undergraduate). Nor is it a direct response to contemporary debates about the legacies of settler colonialism at McGill: the long-contested removal of the statue of James McGill is described without fanfare in the first paragraph of the introduction. Instead, the book arrives as a set of rigorous case studies, an exercise in viewing McGill as an expression of many coalescing and often irreconcilable forces. “Certitude is undermined by registering the immensity and complexity of the past,” the editors write. “There is no single story or polemical lesson to tell.”

The first three chapters map out the life and legacy of the university’s founder. They begin in 1744, in Scotland, with the birth of James McGill. Stephen Mullen, a professor at the University of Glasgow, lays out the economic and social conditions into which McGill was born and hypothesizes about what he would have experienced throughout his education. “The proximity of Old College to the commercial hub of Glasgow further exposed the young James McGill to the vicarious influence of enslavers and their privileged offspring,” Mullen writes, emphasizing the way that slavery — which McGill profited from greatly over the course of his life —“was an everyday feature of Scottish society.”

McGill grew up to be a wealthy merchant and landowner in Montreal, where he moved in 1766, alongside many others of the Scottish elite. “In the twentieth century, James McGill personified the migratory and intellectual connections between Scotland and Canada,” Mullen explains, suggesting that the symbolism of his significant contributions to the Canadian economy may be one reason that, until quite recently, his connections to slavery were also “largely absent” from accounts of his life, particularly ones published in Scotland.

Andrew Mackillop, another Scottish historian, builds on this idea in the second chapter. He suggests that McGill, as he was shaped by the political landscapes of both Glasgow and Montreal, was likely comfortable holding opposing beliefs about human rights and progress. “His provincial worldview meant he almost certainly saw no tension whatsoever in these defining aspects of his life and career,” Mackillop writes of the proprietor’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. “Managing liberty and managing improvement meant privilege for some and enslavement for others.”

Many of McGill’s decisions manifested competing ideals and priorities. When he died, in 1813, he left part of his estate and property to the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, which then founded McGill College in 1821. In a close reading of McGill’s will, Brian Young points out that the otherwise thorough businessman “was surprisingly circumspect in his instructions for the university.” His only two mandates were that it be named after him and that it be “erected within ten years of his death.” If not, the donated assets would revert to designated family members. Young reads the fact that McGill made no attempt to establish the school in his lifetime nor any concrete plans for its mission as an unusual, almost inexplicable abdication of power, one that challenges the idea that he had real convictions about the direction of higher education.

The incongruities these scholars highlight in McGill’s character and biography are elucidating and give way to ideological inconsistencies on a different scale. In looking at one man’s vexing political and moral contradictions, alongside his endowments, we can begin to contextualize both the progress and the unrest at the institution that bears his name.

The remaining eight chapters, along with an afterword, carry readers into understudied events from the past two centuries. We learn of McGill’s founding as a private school and its slow shift to a public funding model, a change that fundamentally altered both its role in Quebec and the makeup of its student body — now 40,500 strong. A classroom attack in 1910 begins E. A. Heaman’s chapter on the humorist and political science professor Stephen Leacock, his student Jacob Viner, and prejudices within economic theory. In another entry, the McGill graduate student Tess Elsworthy considers the administration’s response to the Second World War, which included the temporary exclusion of students of Japanese descent — a decision that divided the campus. In the final essay, Brian Lewis pulls from a wide range of sources to render a fragmentary and poignant look at queer life at McGill and in Montreal more broadly. He quotes In & Out, Daryl Hine’s confessional book-length poem from 1975, which revisits an early sexual encounter at Mont Tremblant: “What does anyone do at eighteen, / without special instruction, the like / of which neither of us had received, / but the age‑old instinctual fumble?”

A first-rate chapter, “Willie McDonald’s McGill,” follows a year in the life of a nineteen-year-old student, who arrived in Montreal in the fall of 1896. The son of a Conservative senator, Willie McDonald came for one reason: to become an engineer. This vocation would serve him well back in Cape Breton, which had, in recent years, turned into a centre for the coal industry. “The very fact that Willie travelled from Nova Scotia to attend McGill exemplified the university’s significant presence in the Maritime region,” writes Don Nerbas. Once in the city, Willie connected with friends of his father: politicians, businessmen, and other well‑to-do transplants from the East Coast.

Nerbas draws from a collection of increasingly strained letters from Willie to his family, most of which feature diligent reports of both his expenses and his grades. He paints an immersive portrait of a lonely student buckling under the pressure of a high-intensity engineering program. But Nerbas looks beyond Willie’s inner turmoil and his attempts to meet his father’s seemingly impossible expectations. Instead he homes in on the subtext of campus violence that permeates the student’s writing. Widespread hazing and brawls are reduced, in both Willie’s missives and newspaper articles from the time, to squabbles. Peers are hospitalized and imprisoned after fights. “I suppose you have heard of the scrap that occurred in the McGill Arts Building,” Willie wrote to his brother. “In it one poor fellow got crushed so badly that he died last Thursday.” Through Willie, we glimpse the social, emotional, and intellectual lives of the children of elite Canadians. “His experience was also symptomatic of broader structural forces reshaping McGill at the end of the nineteenth century,” Nerbas suggests. “The prominent place of engineering at McGill and the masculine student culture Willie encountered were indicative of new career paths, class identities, and attitudes that were being embraced by the urban bourgeoisie.” As with most of these essays, the success of Nerbas’s contribution is in the complexity of its unknowns. Despite his overwhelming privilege and McGill’s rapidly expanding resources, Willie returned home after one year in Montreal without an iron ring and became a bank clerk.

“Like other modern global institutions, McGill can be a force of good or source of pain — or both,” Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey writes in the epilogue. The historian situates the book’s value in direct relation to McGill’s ongoing investments in colonial endeavours and arms manufacturers. “Cataloguing, chronicling, and reconciling institutional memory accordingly seems more urgent than ever,” Adjetey continues. “These lessons illustrate that academic institutions are not merely products of the times, but bastions of state proxy power.” It is demystifying accounts like these that should help schools “generate focused and sustained institutional self-reflection, critique, and contrition.”

By filling these pages with serious and accessible scholarship, the editors have moved toward a truer if less stable image of the university — as it was, as it is, and as it could be.