East-Side story: the standardisation of psychotropic drugs at the Charité Psychiatric Clinic, 1955-1970.

The present article illustrates the history of psychotropic drugs introduced in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1945 onwards. We begin by examining the introduction of an anti-depressant and a tranquilizer at the university psychiatric clinic, Charité, in East Berlin. On the basis of patient files, we consider the monitoring routines, altered by the use of psychotropic drugs, and the difficulties that arose when these routines were translated into existing research programs. In the 1960s, attempts to evaluate the psychiatric practice were based on psychopathology whereas at the end of the 1960s there was a shift to "target symptoms".

Terra incognita: an historiographic approach to the first chlorpromazine trials using patient records of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg.

Psychiatrists have often referred to the discovery of new psychopharmaceutical drugs in the 1950s as a 'therapeutic revolution', which allowed physicians to observe und measure therapeutic effectiveness easily. Contrary to this view, this article will argue that psychiatrists needed the patient's subjective voice to evaluate the effects of the drugs. In a micro-analysis of hospital records of the first patient to be treated with chlorpromazine in the Heidelberg clinic in 1953, I show the different perspectives of doctors and patients on the diagnosis and treatment.The analysis points up how difficult it was to get an impression of the drug's effectiveness.The article emphasizes the importance of the new perspective that includes the patient's voice in the history of psychotropic drugs after 1945.

[Psychotropic drugs in socialism? Drug regulation in the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s]. / Psychopharmaka im Sozialismus. Arzneimittelregulierung in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik in den 1960er Jahren.

The peculiarities of drug regulation in the GDR are best described by a historical reconstruction of a concrete field of practice. The article analyses the regulation of psychotropic drugs by focussing on the centralised planning and control of pharmaceutical research and development in the 1960s. Its starting point is the observation that an introduction of certain psychotropic drugs like tranquilizers was initially controversial in the GDR. As a consequence, the key question is how an agreement over their medical and economic benefit was reached eventually. The article shows how in the course of the 1960s a discursive arrangement between the medical profession, pharmaceutical industry and the state apparatus emerged, which was supported by an increased political involvement of leading scientists and the directing staff of enterprises.

[Magic bullets, chemical gagging, controlled risks? On the research of the network "Pharmaceuticals in the 20th century" of the German Research Foundation (DFG)]. / Magic Bullets, chemische Knebel, beherrschte Risiken? Zum Arbeitsfeld des DFG-Forschungsnetzwerks "Arzneistoffe im 20. Jahrhundert".

Therapeutic substances, their development, testing, application and effects, have in recent years become a central topic of the history of medicine, history of science, and science and technology studies. This paper provides an overview of the literature on this topic through the four-fold perspective of individual substances, industry, patients, and regulation. It introduces the recently established, DFG-funded research network "Pharmaceuticals in the 20th Century" and sketches current methodological approaches to the history of therapeutic substances. At present it appears to be particularly promising to adopt an approach which uses substances or groups of substances as a heuristic device for exploring their complex networks and interdependencies.

[The birth of the 'diagnostic card'--on the genesis of an ,episteme' of neuroleptic efficacy in the early period of research on antipsychotic drugs in the FRG]. / Die Geburt der Stammkarte. Zur Genese eines Epistems der neuroleptischen Wirksamkeit in der frühen Psychopharmakaforschung in der BRD.

This paper describes the introduction of antipsychotic drugs in the FRG in relation to a new definition of the term ',efficacy' It focuses on problems of the standardization of clinical trials in West German psychiatry during the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the development of a diagnostic card for the evaluation of efficacy will be discussed as part of a new experimental system and regarding its role in constructing new knowledge on neuroleptic effects.