Sound & Video / Film

John Huston's documentary for the U.S. Army about soldiers treated for psychiatric breakdown at Mason General Hospital on Long Island after the Second World War. The Army kept it from the public until 1980. Its scenes of narcosynthesis, in which doctors interview soldiers under an intravenous barbiturate, record a drug-assisted psychotherapy that came before the LSD era.

A 1955 medical film made for the drug company Wm. S. Merrell about Howard D. Fabing's experiments at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. A 22-year-old graduate student, "Ronnie," takes 100 micrograms of LSD; the film then shows Merrell's compound MER-17 (azacyclonol, sold as Frenquel) given to prevent or reverse the effects. It belongs to the 1950s search for drugs that could block a "model psychosis."