The 'Mad Major' and his Idiosyncratic War: Linking Military Medicine and Lithium Therapy for Mania

Abstract:Lithium therapy for manic excitement—as devised in the late 1940s by Australian psychiatrist, John Cade—has struggled to find a home in the modern history of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. This paper argues for a repositioning of lithium therapy to more closely align it with World War II, in that it provided Cade with a ‘master class in the practices and processes of experimental science on which he drew in his postwar research. By examining wartime factors involved in his development as a scientific psychiatrist, we explore the nature of the scientific enterprise and the intellectual shaping of a key participant in it.