KOPIN 269Left to right: Joel Elkes, Julius Axelrod, and Seymour S. Kety, 1969
Donated to the Office of NIH History by Dr. Irwin Kopin
that drugs could be important therapeutic agents. Chlorpromazine was
accidentally discovered; it was introduced as a better antihistamine but
was found to have strong sedative effects. When Henri Laborit, a military
surgeon in France, tried it as a pre-anesthetic, he found that the patients
developed what he described as “euphoric quietude.” A fellow surgeon
told his brother-in-law, Pierre Deniker, an assistant to Jean Delay, head
of the Psychiatry Department at Sainte Anne Hospital in Paris, about
the effect observed by Laborit. Delay and Deniker were the first to re
port the spectacular effects of chlorpromazine in psychotic patients
and introduced the term “neuroleptic” to describe this type of drug.
Patients who were unmanageable before became manageable; patients
that were immobile became mobile; psychotic symptoms were allevi
ated. Chlorpromazine was the first breakthrough in drug treatment of
schizophrenia and was approved by the Food and Drug Administra
tion (FDA) in 1954. Although the therapeutic effects did not return
all patients to a normal state, the mental hospitals began to empty and
psychopharmacology was born.
Then, again by chance, MAO inhibitors were discovered. Iproniazid
was first tried as a substitute for Isoniazid to search for a better treatment