Texts / Psychiatry

Moreau de Tours on dawamesc, self-experiment, and experimental psychiatry

Selected passages from Moreau de Tours's 1845 psychiatric treatise on hashish, including his insistence on personal experience, description of dawamesc preparation and dosing, and claim that hashish offered a unique experimental route into the psychology of madness.

New York psychiatrists inject themselves and colleagues with pure mescaline sulphate in twenty-three experiments to model insanity's visual hallucinations. Subjects' reports include specifics—a glass-screen head, the 'mosque of Omar'—and the authors propose a five-level theory of hallucinations versus images.

Werner Stoll's first systematic clinical study of LSD, examining sixteen healthy volunteers and six schizophrenic patients, plus Stoll's own self-experiment. Published in 1947 following Hofmann's 1943 discovery at Sandoz, it established key vocabulary for psychiatric LSD research.