John Cade
1912–1980 · Australian psychiatrist who in 1949 reported that lithium salts calm mania, the first effective drug treatment in modern psychiatry.
John Frederick Joseph Cade was born on 18 January 1912 in Murtoa, Victoria, Australia, the son of a doctor who later ran mental hospitals. He studied medicine at the University of Melbourne. In the Second World War he served as an army medical officer and spent more than three years as a prisoner of the Japanese at Changi in Singapore, where he observed many prisoners with mental disturbances. After the war he worked at the Repatriation Mental Hospital at Bundoora, near Melbourne. With simple equipment he tested whether the urine of manic patients contained a toxic substance, injecting guinea pigs with it and with salts including lithium. The animals given lithium became calm. After testing lithium on himself, he gave it to ten patients with mania, several of whom improved dramatically. His paper 'Lithium salts in the treatment of psychotic excitement' appeared in the Medical Journal of Australia in September 1949. Concerns about toxicity delayed wider use until the work of Mogens Schou and others in the 1950s and 1960s. Cade later ran Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital. He died on 16 November 1980.
Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia
See also: Emil Kraepelin · Philippe Pinel
Key dates
- 1912 Born in Murtoa, Victoria, on 18 January
- 1942–1945 Prisoner of war at Changi
- 1949 Publishes his lithium paper in the Medical Journal of Australia
- 1952 Becomes superintendent of Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital
- 1980 Dies in Melbourne on 16 November
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Notes: The number of mania patients in the 1949 paper is ten; he also treated patients with schizophrenia and depression.