Henri Laborit (November 21, 1914 – May 18, 1995) was a French physician, writer and philosopher.
Laborit was born in Hanoi, Vietnam and started his career as a neurosurgeon in the Marines and then moved on to fundamental research. He won the prestigious Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1957. Laborit later became a research head at Boucicault Hospital in Paris.
His interests included psychotropic drugs, eutonology, and memory. He pioneered the use of dopamine antagonists to reduce shock in injured soldiers. His observation that people treated with these drugs showed reduced interest in their surroundings led to their later use as antipsychotics. He was also the first researcher to study GHB, in the early 1960s. He hoped that it would be an orally bioavailable precursor to the neurotransmitter GABA, but it proved to have other uses and was later discovered as an endogenous neurotransmitter.
Read more about Henri Laborit: Cultural References, Bibliography
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“People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.”
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