John Smythies

John Raymond Smythies M.D. F.R.C.P. (born 30 November 1922) is a neuropsychiatrist, neuroscientist and neurophilosopher.

Smythies was born on 30 November 1922 in Naini Tal, United Provinces, India, where his father Evelyn Arthur Smythies (a noted philatelist) was employed by the Department of Forests. His brother Bertram Evelyn (“Bill”) Smythies became a prominent ornithologist. His cousins on the Smythies side include Richard Dawkins, Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1932 Smythies enrolled at Cheltenham College Junior School, transferred to Rugby School in 1936, and thence to Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1940 (18) and to University College Hospital, London in 1942 where he studied medicine (19). He graduated M.B. B.Chir. (Cantab) in 1945. After two years as a Surgeon-Lieutenant in the R.N.V.R. as ship’s doctor on H.M.S. Porlock Bay based in Bermuda, he completed his basic medical postgraduate training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge before selecting neuropsychiatry for a speciality. Two weeks into his first psychiatric residency at St. George’s Hospital, London (20), noting the close chemical relation between the psychotomimetic drug mescaline and the neurotransmitter catecholamines, he suggested that schizophrenia might be caused by some abnormality in catecholamine metabolism that produced a mescaline-like substance in the brain. In collaboration with the organic chemist John Harley-Mason and Humphry Osmond his psychiatric colleague at St. George’s, he developed this idea, into the first specific biochemical theory of schizophrenia—the transmethylation hypothesis (5).

Inspired by the fact that mescaline produces such remarkable effects on all human mental faculties and by the interdisciplinary work of Albert Schweitzer, in the same year Smythies decided to tackle the mind-brain problem in a systematic way i.e. by undertaking a rigorous training in neuroscience, experimental psychology and philosophy. So first he worked for one year as a resident in the EEG Department at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London (21). He then took an M.Sc. degree in neuroanatomy, philosophy and cultural anthropology with the neuroanatomist William C. Gibson at the University of British Columbia (22). The neuroanatomical research involved was a study of the synaptic structure in human cortex as revealed by silver staining and was awarded a post-graduate M.D degree by Cambridge (23). His teacher in philosophy was the distinguished American philosopher Avrum Stroll, who became a lifelong mentor and friend. This was followed during the tenure of a Nuffield Fellowship by six months with the Nobel Laureate Sir John Eccles in neurophysiology and 18 months at the Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge with Oliver Zangwill studying the stroboscopic patterns (the complex geometrical hallucinations induced by looking at a flickering light). This work has been extensively reviewed by John Geiger (24). Then Smythies worked a further two years in neuropharmacology with Harold E. Himwich in Galesburg, Illinois and with Hudson Hoagland at the Worcester Foundation, before returning to London where he completed his formal clinical psychiatric training with Sir Aubrey Lewis at the Maudsley Hospital (25). He then joined the Faculty of the University of Edinburgh for twelve years, first as Senior Lecturer then Reader (26), before being invited to a personal Chair at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, funded by the Ireland family, where he stayed for eighteen years (27).

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