"Little hedgehogs of doubts"--success and discourse of insulin shock therapy in the 1930s to 1950s]

Insulin shock therapy was one of the major somatic treatments in psychiatry in the 1930s. Even though this treatment was risky, expensive and completely empirical, it spread all over the industrialised world within few years. The development of several centres for this new treatment contributed to this success story, mainly the Viennese Psychiatric-neurological clinic and the Swiss asylum Münsingen. Visiting psychiatrists in these clinics and Jewish émigrés became important advocates of the new therapy in other countries. The success of insulin coma therapy was also based on the hope of many psychiatrists in the 1930s for a more somatic approach for mental illness- thereby promising to catch up with biologically defined 20th century medicine. However the discussion shows that the basic concepts of psychiatric treatment first changed with the discovery of new drugs in the 1950s.