Summary
The discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder is a miraculous story. The key player in this story is Cade, an Australian physician and psychiatrist who was a prisoner of war during World War II. While observing his fellow inmates, Cade hypothesized that there was a chemical build-up in their brains that caused manic episodes and they urinated it out. He experimented with urine from manic patients and found that the uric acid in the urine was toxic for guinea pigs. He discovered that lithium had a calming effect when injected with the toxic urea in the guinea pigs. He then started using lithium in human patients and found a profound reduction in symptoms of mania. Cade published a paper on this discovery, which is now a classic study in the field of psychiatry.