The discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder is truly a miraculous story that I think everyone should know . The key player in this story is a physician by the last name Cade .
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 .
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 . 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 .
It just doesn't , it doesn't actually uh ever become a clear liquid that you can inject . So in order to try injecting different strengths of uric acid , he ended up using lithium to assist in the dilution and lithium worked . So what he basically was doing again for you chemists is he was taking uric acid , he was adding lithium and making a solution of lithium rate .
This is a lot of details , but this is important because what he eventually found is that when he diluted the uric acid with lithium and created lithium ate , lithium ate could actually calm down these guinea pigs that were injected with the toxic urea . He also found that lithium ate , had a generally calming effect on these guinea pigs . So now we're really off in crazy territory , right .
