The inimitable Mind Hacks has found a documentary on (the inimitable) BBC Radio 4 about William Sargant, who
tested drugs on his patients with, some say, catastrophic results. In the 1960s and 1970s he developed his controversial Deep Sleep Treatment in the Sleep Room of St Thomas’s Hospital in London. James talks to some of those who worked under Sargant in the late-1960s and to some of his former patients, who all say that they are still suffering from his treatment to this day.
It sounds like Sargant was quite a match for (and apparently fried of) Montreal’s notorious Ewan Cameron (he of the CIA-funded LSD-based “psychic driving” experiments).
If you haven’t already discovered BBC 4, one of my favorite regular shows there is Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time,” which covers the history of all manner of intellectual activity: science, culture, politics, etc.