opportunities for ‘resistance’,

• +..electro Gnawa


• +..hard techno//EBM


• +..techno

---

+

+

---

---

Lithium became a popular medicinal substance under the influence of the uric acid hypothesis. Proprietary medicines, ‘tonics’ and fashionable mineral spas were advertised as containing lithium and other recommended antidotes to uric acid. Lithium was even put into beer and the drink 7 UP started life as a lithium drink (Healy 2002) (see Illustration 11.1). However laboratory experiments showed that it did not in fact dissolve uric acid crystals, and its use started to decline. Uric acid also dropped out of fashion. However old ideas and practices can take a long time to die out. Lithium continued to be prescribed for gout, arthritis, rheumatism and other complaints. It was listed as a recommended treatment for these conditions until the 1930s in major pharmacopoeias. Even when these publications admitted there was no ‘rational foundations for the use of these (lithium) salts’, they still listed indications for lithium use and instructions on how to administer it (Johnson 1984). It remained available in hospital pharmacies into the 1950s and preparations containing lithium could be obtained over the counter as late as the 1970s in the United Kingdom (Johnson 1984).In 1946 John Cade started experimenting with urine from patients with mania to search for toxins that he believed must be the basis of the condition. By his own account, Cade was an enthusiast for research into the biological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders. He told Johnson that during his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, ‘I could see that so many of the psychiatric patients suffering from the so-called functional psychoses appeared to be sick people in the medical sense. This fired my ambition to discover their aetiology’ (Johnson 1984, p. 34). Cade thought that a toxic substance bound to urates might be the cause of mania and mixed patients urine with lithium to dissolve the urates before injecting the mixture into guinea pigs. When he found that the guinea pigs were sedated by this mixture, he thought that lithium might have a therapeutic effect in manic patients. It has subsequently been suggested that he was actually observing signs of severe toxicity in the guinea pigs since they received large doses of lithium (Johnson 1984, p. 36).
Moncrieff, J