Origins
In 1927 Sakel, who had recently qualified as a doctor in Vienna and was working in a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, began to use low (sub-coma) doses of insulin to treat drug addicts and psychopaths. Having returned to Vienna, he treated schizophrenic patients with larger doses of insulin in order to produce coma and sometimes convulsions. Sakel made public his results in 1933 and his methods were soon taken up by other psychiatrists.
Joseph Wortis, after seeing Sakel practice it in 1935, introduced it to the USA. British psychiatrists from the Board of Control visited Vienna in 1935 and 1936, and by 1938 thirty-one hospitals in England and Wales had insulin treatment units. In 1936 Sakel moved to New York and promoted the use of insulin coma treatment in American psychiatric hospitals. By the late 1940s the majority of psychiatric hospitals in the USA were using insulin coma treatment.
Read more about this topic: Insulin Shock Therapy
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