jan 1, 1949 - John Cade popularizes the usage of lithium in treatment of "psychotic excitement" in veterans' hospital in Melbourne

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The modern revival of lithium began in 1949 in the Bundoora Repatriation Hospital, a veterans’ hospital in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, when John Cade, aware of Garrod’s success in using lithium a century previously in the treatment of gout, hypothesized that some condition involving uric acid might lie behind his manic patients’ “psychotic excitement”; Cade began treating 10 of them with lithium citrate and lithium carbonate. Some responded remarkably well, becoming essentially normal and capable of discharge after years of illness (14). Unfortunately, 1949 was precisely the wrong time for such an article to appear—after a recent failed experiment with lithium chloride as a substitute for sodium chloride in patients with congestive heart failure (15)—and moreover, in such a then-obscure journal. Cade’s discovery was significant not just because it added an important new agent to the psychopharmacologic armamentarium but because it illustrated the triumph of the scientific method, at a time when psychiatry was in danger of losing sight of science.

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