Heinz E. Lehmann

Heinz Edgar Lehmann (born July 17, 1911 in Berlin , † April 7, 1999 in Montreal ) was a Canadian psychiatrist.

Lehmann came from a family of doctors and began to be interested in psychiatry as a teenager, after reading the works of Sigmund Freud . He studied medicine in Freiburg, Marburg, Vienna and received his doctorate in Berlin in 1935. Since his father was Jewish, he was persecuted by the National Socialists and moved to Canada in 1937. He received a preliminary license to practice as a doctor in Quebec and worked at the Verdun Protestant Hospital (later Douglas Hospital) in Montreal (he did not receive a final license as a doctor until 1963 and did not become a member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada until 1971 ). In 1947 he became clinical director and in 1962 research director of Douglas Hospital. In 1967 he became director of medical education at Douglas Hospital and from 1971 to 1975 he was the Faculty of Psychiatry at McGill University (which was affiliated with Douglas Hospital). From 1981 he was also Deputy Commissioner in the research department of the New York State Office of Mental Health in Albany, New York .

He pioneered the use of chlorpromazine as a psychotropic drug for schizophrenia in the 1950s after hearing about the related work of Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker in France. Lehmann conducted clinical studies in Montreal, which showed good results. Soon after, he was also one of the first in North America to use imipramine against depression (he had previously read about relevant experiments by Roland Kuhn in Switzerland). Many of his publications dealt with psychotropic drugs.

In 1957 he received the Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award . In 1998 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame . He was an officer in the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada .

Web links

• Obituary by Joel Paris ( Memento from September 26, 2006 in the Internet Archive )