Showing results by author "Wallace B. Mendelson" in All Categories

Updated edition. In the years following World War II, there were no effective medicines for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression. There were not even names for such things— words like ‘antipsychotic’, ‘mood stabilizer’,‘antidepressant’ or ‘tranquilizer’ had not even come into being. Within the next two decades all these types of medicines were developed. Most of these discoveries occurred inadvertently, often with a chance observation by a physician or scientist who was looking for something else. Who would have predicted that war surplus fuel from German V2...

In December 1906, two scientists, the Italian Camillo Golgi and the Spaniard Santiago Ramón y Cajal, arrived in Stockholm to jointly receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Golgi had discovered a breakthrough method of visualizing neurons under the microscope in 1873. He also believed that the nervous system was different from the rest of the body: instead of being composed of a multitude of individual cells, he thought it was one vast ‘reticulum’ of cells which were anatomically fused together, making ‘unity of action’ possible. Cajal, a decade younger, had improved on ...

The poet Emily Dickinson rarely left her home after her mid-thirties, and saw few people aside from her father. When visitors came, she was apt to disappear into her room, and those who wished to speak with her did so through a closed door. Rather than interact with neighborhood children, she would send down baskets of gingerbread from her second story window. In 1874, when she was forty-four, her father passed away. The funeral was held in the front room of their home; she did not attend, but listened from her upstairs bedroom. During these years she created some of the most beautiful ...