Robert Galbraith Heath

Robert Galbraith Heath (May 9, 1915 – September 21, 1999) was an American psychiatrist. He followed the theory of biological psychiatry, which holds that organic defects are the sole source of mental illness, and that consequently mental problems are treatable by physical means. He published 425 papers and three books. One of his first papers is dated 1946. He was profiled as a "famous American psychiatrist" in 1983 by Psychiatric Annals.

Heath founded the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University, New Orleans, in 1949 and remained its chairman until 1980. He performed many experiments there involving electrical stimulation of the brain via surgically implanted electrodes. He placed deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes into the brains of more than 54 patients. He has been cited as the first, or one of the first, researcher(s) to have placed electrodes deep into the brains of living human patients. Heath also experimented with psychosurgery, the drug bulbocapnine to induce stupor, and LSD, using African-American prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary as experimental subjects. He worked on schizophrenia patients, which he regarded as an illness with a physical basis. Today Heath's work is considered highly controversial and is only rarely used as reference material.

Personal life Heath was born on May 9, 1915, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After returning from the war, he studied at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, at Columbia University. In 1954, Heath published a monograph called "Studies in Schizophrenia" detailing his deep brain stimulation experiments on 25 schizophrenic patients. The study's methodology was met with much criticism at the time. During the course of his experiments in deep brain stimulation, Heath experimented with DBS as a means of facilitating arousal, claiming to have converted a homosexual patient to heterosexuality, labeled in his 1972 paper as Patient B-19. He later conducted a National Institutes of Health-funded study on 13 rhesus monkeys, with one rotating group representing "heavy smokers" whose cannabis dosage was believed to be comparable to three marijuana cigarettes smoked daily, a "moderate" group that was given the equivalent of one joint a day, and a third group that puffed inactive cannabis. He concluded, "Alcohol is a simple drug with a temporary effect. Marijuana is complex with a persisting effect." According to the BBC, "His findings of permanent brain damage have been dismissed by similar, independently conducted studies. But other scientists have argued these methods of animal research are inconclusive." According to NORML, Heath's "work was never replicated and has since been discredited by a pair of better controlled, much larger monkey studies, one by Dr. William Slikker of the National Center for Toxicological Research and the other by Charles Rebert and Gordon Pryor of SRI International."

Selected publications "Cerebellar stimulation in treating intractable behavior disorders" Curr Psychiatr Ther. 1981;20:329–36 "The cerebellar pacemaker for intractable behavioral disorders and epilepsy: follow-up report." Biol Psychiatry. 1980 Apr;15(2):243–56. "Intracranial self-stimulation in man." Science. 1963 Apr 26;140(3565):394–96.