ELKES 207the School of Medicine and in a small new building provided by the
hospital board (we were already working at the City Mental Hospital).
What was needed was an Early Treatment Center, comprising inpatient
and outpatient facilities. Again, we were fortunate. Through the inter
vention of J. J. O’Reilly, a mansion that had previously been the home
of the Cadbury chocolate family became available. The name of the
house was “Uffculme” and the name of our Clinic thus became the
“Uffculme Clinic.” Standing in its own lovely grounds, it comprised
42 beds, a day hospital, and an outpatient clinic.^7
At that time, then, there were two anchoring points for our work in
the mental disease field: neurochemistry, at the bench level, and human
behavior, as influenced by drugs. There was nothing in between, no
indicator that could relate the effects of drugs on the brain in the con
scious animal to behavior, nor any correlation between behavior and
chemistry of the brain. I began to hunt again and began to read avidly
into EEG studies coming from various sources. The data available were
sparse, however.
Then Phillip Bradley, a trained zoologist who had carried out micro-
electrode studies in insects, joined us. He spent some time with Grey
Walter learning EEG techniques and then set up his own laboratory in
the second of the two rooms of “Mental Diseases Research.” In 1949,
Bradley was developing his pioneering technique for recording the elec
trical activity in the conscious animal,^8 a procedure that in those days
(the days of sulfonamide–not penicillin), was quite a trick. The work
proceeded well and quickly established reference points for a pharmaco
logy of the brain, inasmuch as it relates to behavior. We came to the
conclusion that there were families of naturally occurring neuroactive
compounds with regional distribution in the brain. Acetylcholine,
norepinephrine, serotonin, and histamine were apparently compounds
of this grouping, the receptors for them existed in the brain, and the drugs
interacted with these receptors. The concept of families of compounds,
derived and evolved from respective common chemical roots, govern
ing the physiology of the brain (and, by implication, the chemistry of
awareness, perception, affect, and memory), was a confusing idea at the
time, and I must say was not very well received by the pharmacological
fraternity. However, it has persisted. We went on talking particularly