And lo and behold , found an absolutely profound and positive effect of lithium in reducing symptoms of mania . And as all good physician scientists do , he wrote up his results and he wrote it up in a paper entitled lithium Salts and the treatment of psychotic excitement . Ok .
He in sort of 19 forties style medicine , uh this would not happen . Now , he very quickly moved from that animal model into human patients and started injecting human patients with lithium or providing lithium orally to those patients . And lo and behold , found an absolutely profound and positive effect of lithium in reducing symptoms of mania .
But it's an absolutely wonderful paper and it's an absolutely wonderful voyage into the history of psychiatry . Right down to the discussion where in just three short paragraphs cade really lays out the case for why lithium is such a important discovery in the treatment of what at that time they were calling psychotic excitement and what we now know to be manic bipolar depression .
Cade was a good scientist in addition to being a good physician and by good scientists , I mean that he did control experiments here . He was injecting lithium rate into animals and see an effect . But he knew that that solution of lithium ate contained not just the uric acid but it also contained lithium .
And so he quite appropriately asked , maybe the lithium alone is having this calming effect on these guinea pigs . And indeed , that was the case when he did the proper control experiment and injected only lithium solution into these guinea pigs . They calm down from there .
