The surgeon who accidentally revolutionized psychiatry by trying to put soldiers into hibernation

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Henri Laborit was a French navy surgeon searching for ways to prevent surgical shock. Instead of just stabilizing patients, his experiments with a new drug led to the birth of modern psychopharmacology. He changed how the world treats mental illness, yet spent his life battling for proper recognition of his work.

Born in 1914, Henri Laborit was a man of restless intellect who navigated a career spanning naval surgery, neurobiology, and philosophy. During his time as a surgeon, he was deeply troubled by the high mortality rates associated with surgical stress. His solution was to induce a state of artificial hibernation, using a cocktail of drugs to lower a patient's basal metabolism and body temperature. This pursuit led him to request a sample of a new phenothiazine, RP 4560, from the pharmaceutical company Rhône-Poulenc in 1951.

While the drug was intended to stabilize the central nervous system, Laborit noticed a peculiar side effect: patients became remarkably indifferent to their surroundings. Recognizing this potential, he convinced psychiatrists to test it on a manic patient. The results were transformative, leading to a massive decline in the inpatient population of mental institutions globally. Despite this, Laborit found himself in a lifelong conflict with the psychiatric establishment, particularly at Sainte-Anne Hospital, where competing claims over the discovery of chlorpromazine’s psychiatric utility overshadowed his foundational contributions.

Laborit’s influence extended far beyond the operating room. He was an early advocate for complexity theory and transdisciplinarity, famously appearing as himself in the 1980 film Mon oncle d'Amérique to explain his theories on human behavior. Though he received the Lasker-DeBakey Award in 1957, he remained a polarizing figure who rejected the constraints of academia. By the time of his death in 1995, he was remembered as a brilliant, if bitter, pioneer who had helped change the face of mental illness while remaining an outsider to the very institutions he helped modernize.

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