William Lorenz

William F. Lorenz (February 15, 1882 – February 19, 1958) was an American physician and United States Army officer. He was decorated for his combat actions in the United States Army Medical Corps during World War I. He served for decades as a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison, Wisconsin.

Life Lorenz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1882, and received his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine in 1903.

He was a professor of Neuropsychiatry and chief of the Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Lorenz is credited, along with William Bleckwenn, with developing the technique of sodium amytal-mediated disinhibition ("narcosynthesis" or "narcoanalysis"), which allowed psychiatrists to probe the minds of psychotic patients for diagnostic information. Along with colleagues, he also developed a relatively effective treatment for neurosyphilis using an arsenic compound called tryparsamide. Lorenz collaborated with physiologists and pharmacologists on methods to break catatonic mutism; these studies, which were sporadically but dramatically successful, used dilute intravenous solutions of sodium cyanide and the inhalation of carbon dioxide.

Personal life Lorenz and his first wife, Ada, had five sons: William F. Lorenz, Jr., Adrian, Thomas, Paul, and Joseph. Adrian Lorenz died as an infant in 1916, and his wife died in 1942. William Lorenz, Sr. remarried (to Marvel Lorenz) in 1946. He retired from active medical practice in 1952 and died of heart disease in Madison, Wisconsin in February 1958. Lorenz remained in the U.S. Army National Guard after his service in Europe, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel (O-5).