A RETROSPECT OF MODERN PSYCHIATRY. 
5 
The melancholic, who for months or years, would remain emotionally 
depressed, indifferent to life, often indeed actively searching for death 
or A young man in the prime of life, weighed down by such a 
load of anxiety, that a decision became impossible and even interesting 
work could not be undertaken through his inhibitions and disinterest 
or A woman whose chief thought was the means of killing her 
children lest they too would suffer 
or A man the victim of a ceaseless obsession that he must perform 
an act of antisocial nature, which must inevitably produce his ruin. 
We have seen such cases in hundreds, nay thousands. Whilst cure 
often ensued, it's course was slow and unpredictable. Often the coroner’s 
court and the mental hospital were the final repository. We have prayed 
earnestly for a magic philtre which would disperse the evil cloud of 
depressive thought and make the obsession recede beyond the ken of 
consciousness. 
To-day our prayers have been answered through the modern miracle 
of shock therapy. The word “ Miracle” is not an indication of 
enthusiasm run riot but of sober fact tempered by experience. With 
shock therapy each patient I have mentioned has the probability of 
freedom from symptoms within two or three weeks. Within a week 
the suieidally inclined, the child-murderer, the anxiety-ridden and the 
obsessed may be taking a cheerful intelligent interest in their surround- 
ings and be so divorced from their depressive past as to forget entirely 
their morbid thoughts. 
Within the last ten years, the advent of shock therapy has com- 
pletely revolutionised the practice of psychiatry by eliminating the 
time-lag of the old proceedings and creating an early atmosphere of 
enthusiastic co-operation. 
The story behind shock is another admirable illustration of 
scientific progress, its interrelationship with other branches, of 
unexpectedness and lack of continuity. 
In the year 1781 a William Oliver of London described that a case 
of mania improved after a course of camphor had given convulsions. 
150 years were to elapse before the technique became common practice 
and then it was introduced almost simultaneously by two independent 
workers on different lines. 
In 1928 Manfred Sakel was using Insulin in the cure of drug- 
addiction and found that sometimes when large amounts are employed 
severe hypoglycaemic shocks and convulsions produce remarkably 
successful therapeutic results. 
Prior to 1932, it had been noted that if convulsions occurred in a 
case of Catatonic Schizophrenia, there might be a remission, and that 
remarkably few epileptics suffer from this common mental disorder. 
In 1933, von Meduna, after experimenting with animals, injected 
an intra-muscular camphor preparation (25 per cent, of oleum cam- 
phoratum) into a series of human patients. The method was clumsy 
since the convulsions were uncertain. Soon it was replaced by 
intravenous cardiazol — pentamethylene tetrazol — in 10 per cent, solution. 
A list of favourable results was published. The treatment soon 
swept the world and was tried in many thousands of cases. Gradually 
the relative scope of usefulness for Insulin and Cardiazol was mapped 
out. It was discovered that although the latter was designed for 
