Ketamine, Clio, and the hippocratic triangle—fragments of the history of ketamine

Abstract

abstract The objective of this chapter is to highlight some intriguing aspects of the history of ketamine. First, we will review the methodologies used when writing a small fragment of the overall history of psychopharmacology. Second, and due to the recent explosion of papers on ketamine and related substances in the past decade, we have focused on two themes, the interplay of ketamine with the nosologic status of “dissociation” and the repeated encounters of Edward Domino with ketamine and some of its psychotropic effects. Finally, this chapter does not end offering some inchoate conclusions or pretentious sagely advice about the future of psychopharmacology and the glutamate antagonists but rather wishes to be a critical reflection on psychiatry s constant reinvention and shifting paradigms, as it has been fashionable to say since Kuhn.