Turn on, tune, in...investigate your subconscious?

On 19th April 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally got some of the chemical he was synthesising onto his fingers, resulting in what he described as a dreamlike intoxication that lasted for two hours. His employers, Sandoz pharmaceuticals were quick to recognise that this new drug, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, had a lot of potential. It was soon being marketed as a psychiatric drug under the trade name Delysid.

Meanwhile in Worcestershire, Ronald Sandison had taken up his first consultancy post at Powick Hospital. Originally built in 1847 to house 200 inmates, the former Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum was home to around 1000 patients by the 1950s. In his autobiography, A century of psychiatry, psychotherapy and group analysis, Sandison described the hospital as “bleak in the extreme…I discovered that the heating was defunct, many of the internal telephones did not work, and the hospital was deeply impoverished in every department.” As part of attempts to transform the hospital by Sandison and his colleagues, in 1952 he embarked on a study tour of Swiss psychiatric hospitals. It was during this visit that he met Albert Hofmann and became aware of the therapeutic potential of LSD.

Returning to England with a supply of the drug, Sandison developed what he referred to as “psycholytic therapy”, using small amounts of LSD to assist patients in exploring their subconscious. By 1958, Powick Hospital had a dedicated LSD treatment unit, where Sandison worked until he left the hospital in 1964. LSD therapy continued at Powick for a further two years after Sandison’s departure. The increasing publicity around recreational use of LSD by figures such as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, along with tighter regulation of its use, led to Sandoz withdrawing the drug from the market.

After leaving Powick Hospital, Sandison never again used LSD therapy. However, he continued to believe in its value as a treatment when used in a clinical setting.

Although Ronald Sandison is primarily remembered for his pioneering work in LSD therapy, this was far from his only area of expertise. His personal papers, now available at the Wellcome Library as PP/SAN, show Sandison as a medical renaissance man, who was successful in a number of different fields during his career. Besides his work with LSD and other psychedelic drugs like mescaline and psilocybin, the collection covers his work with the Group Analytic Society, (whose archives are also held by the library, as SA/GAS, and the Pastoral Development Group, as well as his work in in family planning, and with alcoholics in Shetland. Also included are a series of dream diaries kept by Sandison between 1948 and 2009.

Image:
Pink elephants on parade LSD blotter, from Wikimedia Commons - click for copyright information.

Item of the Month February 2011: Notes on Yagé

Back in July last year, we wrote about some items from our collections relating to Arthur Conan Doyle. We deliberately left one item out from that post, as we wanted to write in more detail about it at a later date.

So, as our Item of the Month for February 2011, here's a post dedicated to this item: a manuscript that links Conan Doyle, fellow novelist H Rider Haggard and a hallucinogenic plant from South America (WMS/Amer.148).

It's a report from 1927 by Edward Morell Holmes, an English botanist, into the properties of Yagé, a South American drug, which - refering to a conversation initiated by Sir H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines - "causes clairvoyant and telepathic effects". The manuscript refers to a full account of the drug by A. Rouhier in Bulletin des Sciences Pharmacologiques, 1926, 33, 252-261 (which Holmes' notes summarise) and also to South American knowledge of Yagé.

But the Conan Doyle connection comes with the most fascinating aspect of this manuscript. The notes talk of a tincture of the drug prepared by the leading pharmacist W.H. Martindale (1875?-1933) and Holmes's attempts to pass it on to "some of our leading scientific Spiritualists to experiment with including Sir A. Conan Doyle, Professor (Sir) Oliver Lodge, and Sir (W.) F. Barrett".

These beliefs of these men in the ability to contact the spirit world is well recorded: Conan Doyle took his belief strongly enough to publish a History of Spiritualism in 1926; Lodge, a key figure in the development of the wireless, was like Conan Doyle a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and Barrett was a physicist and the author of such works as The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism and On The Threshold Of A New World Of Thought.

But do we know if their interest in spiritualism was enough for these men to test out the "telepathic effects" of the tincture"? Did Holmes, indeed, ever contact them? So far, our research has drawn a blank...

Whilst we often feature as our Items of the Month, material from the Library that is well-researched, here's an instance of a manuscript we feel in need of more attention. Given its hoped for attraction to men of letters from the early 20th century, we even wonder if the notes may even shed light on the interest in Yagé of the beat author William Burroughs in the 1950s, in light of possible explanations as to how Burroughs developed an interest in the drug.

We wonder then, if Holmes's notes featured here may add something to this debate: even if not, they shed an intriguing light on scientific and literary circles in the early part of the twentieth century, and suggest a topic that we feel would have piqued the interest - and possibly the taste buds - of Holmes's namesake and Conan Doyle's most famous literary creation.

Images:
- Text of Holmes's Notes on Yagé
- Portrait of Edward Morell Holmes

With thanks to Mike Jay

Re-'Revealing the Mind Bender General'

When first broadcast last year, we posted on the BBC Radio 4 documentary, 'Revealing the Mind Bender General', which discussed the controversial career of Dr William Sargant, whose papers are held by the Wellcome Library.

Radio 4 is repeating the documentary tonight (17th March) at 9pm. For those unable to tune in, the documentary is available for listeners in the UK through BBC iPlayer and
can also be listened to through the blog Speechification.

William Sargant documentary

BBC Radio 4 today aired a documentary called Revealing the Mind Bender General.

Details:

James Maw on the controversial psychiatrist Dr William Sargant, who tested drugs on his patients with, some say, catastrophic results.

In the 1960s and 1970s he developed his controversial Deep Sleep Treatment in the Sleep Room of St Thomas's Hospital in London. James talks to some of those who worked under Sargant in the late-1960s and to some of his former patients, who all say that they are still suffering from his treatment to this day.

The documentary also investigates allegations that Sargant was involved in secret military experiments with hallucinogenic drugs.

Sargant's papers are held by the Wellcome Library, and the documentary quotes from Sargant's notes on patients undergoing Deep Sleep Treatment and also his correspondence with the writer Robert Graves (in particular, on Graves taking the drug psilocybin - "magic mushrooms").

The documentary is available through the BBC’s iPlayer for the next 7 days.