Humphry Osmond (1917–2004) was a British psychiatrist who did much of his best-known work in Canada. His BMJ obituary says he trained at Guy’s Hospital, moved in 1951 to the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan with government and Rockefeller Foundation funding, and later worked in Princeton and Alabama (BMJ, 2004).
With Abram Hoffer in Saskatoon he ran LSD and mescaline studies, many of them on alcoholism (Dyck, 2005). The obituary reports about 2,000 alcoholism patients treated between 1954 and 1960, with 40% to 45% not drinking a year later, but those are the researchers’ own figures from uncontrolled studies (BMJ, 2004). In May 1953 he guided Aldous Huxley through his first mescaline experience in Los Angeles (Abraham, 2020).
He coined “psychedelic” in a 1956 letter to Huxley (Abraham, 2020) and introduced it publicly in a March 1957 paper (Osmond, 1957). Dyck concludes that the Saskatchewan group failed to run randomized controlled trials just as these were becoming the standard, and that LSD’s link to the counterculture helped end the work (Dyck, 2005). His studies used LSD and mescaline, not psilocybin.
Sources
- Humphry Osmond obituary, BMJ, 2004
- Dyck, 2005: Flashback, psychiatric experimentation with LSD
- Abraham, 2020, review of the Huxley–Osmond letters
- Osmond, 1957, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
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