Lithium when was it discovered

The first isolation of elemental lithium was achieved later by W. Brande and Sir Humphrey Davy by the electrolysis of lithium oxide. In , Bunsen and Mattiessen isolated larger quantities of the metal by electrolysis of lithium chloride. Estimated Crustal Abundance : 2.

Estimated Oceanic Abundance : 1. Number of Stable Isotopes : 2 View all isotope data. Electron Shell Configuration :. Lithium Previous Isotopes Next. Lithium reacts with water, but not as violently as sodium.

Citation and linking information For questions about this page, please contact Steve Gagnon. During the Second World War, Cade was interned for more than three years in the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at Changi in Singapore. He was put in charge of the psychiatric section, where he began to note the decisive link between certain food deficiencies and diseases in his fellow prisoners. A lack of B vitamins, for instance, caused beriberi and pellagra. After the war, he pursued his investigations.

Working from an abandoned pantry in Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital near Melbourne, Australia, he began to collect urine samples from people with depression, mania and schizophrenia, aiming to discover whether some secretion in their urine could be correlated to their symptoms. With no access to sophisticated chemical analysis and largely unguided by theory, Cade injected the urine into the abdominal cavities of guinea pigs, raising the dose until they died.

The urine of people with mania proved especially lethal to the animals. Drug discovery: A life of tumult and triumph. Cade also noticed that a large dose of the medication tended to calm the guinea pigs. He could turn them on their backs, and the normally restive rodents would gaze placidly back at him. He wondered whether lithium could have the same tranquillizing effect on his patients. After trying it out on himself to establish a safe dose, Cade began treating ten people with mania. In September , he reported fast and dramatic improvements in all of them in the Medical Journal of Australia J.

Cade Med. The majority of these patients had been in and out of Bundoora for years; now, five had improved enough to return to their homes and families. Credit: Charles D.

Soon, moving along the rows of the periodic table like a beachcomber on a shore, Cade began to experiment with salts of rubidium, cerium and strontium. None proved therapeutic. In , he also abandoned his experiments with lithium. Brown also weaves in the story of Mogens Schou. The Danish psychiatrist was as much a hero as Cade, fighting long and hard to get lithium accepted as a treatment for bipolar disorder.

He knew the condition intimately, because his brother had it. Starting in the s, Schou teamed up with fellow psychiatrist Poul Baastrup to conduct a series of lithium experiments with ever stricter conditions, culminating in a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.