After WW2, a British junior doctor, Harold Bourne, had published his paper ‘The Insulin Myth’ in The Lancet. Dr Bourne’s 1953 paper showed that there was no basis for the belief that insulin coma had beneficial effects in the treatment of schizophrenia. But because insulin coma had government approval and had been adopted by psychiatry’s big guns including William Sargant, Dr Bourne was vilified. After he had published the paper, which raised questions and eventually saved many patients from this harrowing treatment, Dr Bourne ”became unemployable in any self respecting psychiatric department” and moved to New Zealand where his abilities were recognised and he won the Evan Jones Prize for ‘the most distinguished contribution to psychiatry in Australasia.’

Nowadays Dr Bourne is seen as just one of the many voices raised against insulin coma and the treatment was undoubtedly controversial at the time. In 1937 the following  description of insulin coma therapy was published in The British Medical Journal by Dr E H Larkin. “Within about half an hour he (the patient) becomes restless, tossing from side to side, at first moaning and later crying out. He leaps up in bed, staring and crying out aloud. He throws himself about violently and has the appearance of maniacally resisting a great fear. He froths at the mouth and his pupils dilate. He may beat his head and hands and feet frantically…… coma follows and the patient lies shrunken into his bed, profoundly collapsed with a diminished pulse….. he salivates profusely, and must be laid on his side to allow the saliva to run out…… from time to time he may be convulsed. Occasionally a true epileptic fit may be seen.”

It has been said that if insulin coma is not a torture, nothing is. Insulin coma was finally discredited in 1957 when a controlled randomised study was published in The Lancet and according to Dr Kingsly Jones the treatment “was soon abandoned”. How is it then that Dr William Sargent was still advocating its use as late as 1972 in the fifth edition of Sargant and Slater’s standard textbook ‘An Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry?’