History of Medicine

When LSD Was Respectable: The father of psychedelic medicine has died:

Humphry Osmond, the psychiatrist who coined the word 'psychedelic' for the drugs to which he introduced the writer and essayist Aldous Huxley, died on Feb. 6 at his home in Appleton, Wis. He was 86.

...Dr. Osmond entered the history of the counterculture by supplying hallucinogenic drugs to Huxley, who ascribed mystical significance to them in his playfully thoughtful, widely read book 'The Doors of Perception,' from which the rock group the Doors took its name.

...Dr. Osmond first offered his new term, psychedelic, at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957. He said the word meant "mind manifesting" and called it "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations."

Huxley had sent Dr. Osmond a rhyme with his own word choice: "To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme." (Thymos means soul in Greek.)

Rejecting that, Dr. Osmond replied: "To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic."

Dr. Osmond was no psychedelic virgin, either:

At St. George's Hospital in London, he and a colleague, John R. Smythies, developed the hypothesis that schizophrenia was a form of self-intoxication caused by the body's mistakenly producing its own L.S.D.-like compounds.

When their theory was not embraced by the British mental health establishment, the two doctors moved to Canada to continue their research at Saskatchewan Hospital in Weyburn. There, they developed the idea, not widely accepted, that no one should treat schizophrenics who had not personally experienced schizophrenia.

"This it is possible to do quite easily by taking mescaline," they wrote.

...."There was a certain point where almost every major psychiatrist wanted to do hallucinogen research," Dr. Halpern said, adding that in the early 1960's, it was recommended that psychiatric residents take a dose to understand psychosis better.

That's taking empathy a little too far.