Humphry Osmond

Humphry Osmond

Dr. Humphry Fortescue Osmond was a British psychiatrist, who is known for coining the phrase psychedelic, which he claimed ment "mind manifesting" and called it "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations." Dr. Osmond was born on July 1, 1917, in Surrey. He attended Guy's Hospital Medical School of the University of London. During World War II, Dr. Osmond trained to become a psychiatrist, while being a surgeon-lieutenant in the Navy. Dr. Humphry Osmond died of cardiac arrhythmia on February 6, 2004.

Dr. Osmond attracted attention in the 1950s for his work with psychedelics at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada. Dr. Osmond primarily worked with LSD and mescaline and their relation to psychosis and mental illness. In 1952, Dr. Osmond related the similarity of mescaline to adrenaline molecules, in a theory which implied that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by ones own body. In 1953 Dr. Osmond introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline, which inspired the book The Doors of Perception. Dr. Osmond is also known for one study in the late 1950s in which he attempted to cure alcoholics with acute LSD treatment, which resulted with a suprising success rate.

Dr. Osmond wrote many books and was widely published throughout his career and later became director of the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry at the New Jersey Psychiatric Institute in Princeton, and then a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.