science · 22 March 1916 · 108 years ago
birth
Born 22 Mar 1916; died 11 Feb 1983 at age 66.
Nathan Schellenberg Kline was an American psychiatrist who is credited with founding the field of psychopharmacology. In 1953, he began investigating the use of a new drug, reserpine, to treat schizophrenia. He continued to pioneer in the biochemical treatment of mentally ill patients by introducing the use of such drugs as the antidepressants lithium and iproniazid and the tranquilizer resperine. Because these drugs so successfully drugs treated two of the major categories of psychiatric illness, thousands of patients - formerly considered untreatable - were able to leave institutions and to rejoin society. By 1957, iproniazid, first in the class of monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors, was treating an estimated 400,000 people in the U.S.
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