John Smythies was a British psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and psychedelic pioneer, who spent much of his professional life in the US. In 1953 he and colleague Humphrey Osmond gave Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline, the effects of which he described in The Doors of Perception.
John Raymond Smythies was born on 30 November 1922 in Nainital, British India, the son of Evelyn Arthur Smythies, who worked in the Indian Forest Service, and his wife Olive Muriel (née Cripps), whose father Percy Howard Cripps was a landowner.
As a young boy he was sent to attend school in England, firstly Cheltenham College Junior Preparatory School, then Rugby School. He obtained his medical degree in 1945 from Cambridge, having studied at Christ’s College, with the clinical years spent at University College Hospital in London. After two years as a Royal Navy surgeon aboard HMS Porlock Bay in Bermuda, he returned to train as a psychiatrist at St George’s Hospital in London.
It was during this period that he became aware both of the old German literature on the hallucinogenic effects of the peyote cactus derivative mescaline, and also the striking structural similarities between it and a metabolite of adrenalin called adrenochrome. He introduced these ideas to his then senior registrar, Humphrey Osmond, and together they developed and proposed what was the first biochemical theory of schizophrenia—the transmethylation hypothesis. Although ultimately not substantiated, their theory was a paradigm shift in our thinking about psychiatric disease and heralded the modern era of biochemical psychiatry.
The intention back then had been to use psychedelics like mescaline and, subsequently, LSD as vehicles by which educated individuals with a suitable background—in medicine or philosophy, for example—could explore and better understand the nature of consciousness. John only ever took mescaline and that just on two occasions. Years later he reminisced how during those hours he had walked down street after street with their houses and inhabitants transformed into pastel drawings.
It was Smythies and Osmond who furnished Aldous Huxley with his famous first dose of mescaline, that he took “one bright May morning” in 1953, the effects of which he describes in The Doors of Perception. And a direct line can be drawn from those salad days to the counterculture, drug revolution, and psychonauts of the 1960s, and then on to the decades of psychedelic suppression during the anti-hippie movement. Fortunately, John was to live long enough to see the recent welcome resurfacing of these drugs as potential therapeutic agents, with significant promise in treating a variety of ails.
After this early period Smythies moved to tackle the mind-brain problem in a systematic manner. He did so by undertaking a year of EEG training at the National Hospital for Neurology in London, an MSc in neuroanatomy, philosophy and cultural anthropology at the University of British Columbia, a six month spell in Australia with the neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles, 18 months at Cambridge University’s psychological laboratory studying vision, and two years of neuropharmacology in Illinois. He then returned to the Maudsley Hospital in London to complete his formal psychiatric training under Sir Aubrey Lewis. A peripatetic and eclectic training that would be nigh on impossible in today’s NHS!
John spent more than a decade at the University of Edinburgh’s psychiatry department, first as a senior lecturer and then reader. He moved to take up a personal chair in psychiatry at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, in the US, which is where he was to remain for the rest of his clinical career. His appointment in Alabama was direct, owing to a conversation with an influential southern family whom he had met during a lecture tour of the US. He was the first psychiatrist ever to tell them that their daughter’s schizophrenia was not a consequence of her upbringing. John subsequently helped his old confrere Humphrey Osmond join him at the University of Alabama, though in the psychology department. Osmond’s own career had been hamstrung by his ongoing association with psychedelics; a word he coined.
John eventually “retired” from clinical practice to become a project scientist at the centre for brain and cognition, at the University of California, San Diego. During these final decades he flourished, immersing himself in the atmosphere at UCSD and the broader San Diego neuroscience scene. He published broadly and ferociously, with an average rate of seven or eight papers a year and a book every alternate year—an inspiration to students and faculty alike! His most recent works were on the claustrum’s putative role in qualia and consciousness, as well as that of exosomes in cortical differentiation, and what telocytes do.
John’s standard approach to science was to explain function in terms of structure down to the level of the molecule. In the era of DNA and the double helix, we tend to take this for granted, but in mid-20th century psychiatry, when the refrigerator mother hypothesis of schizophrenia was still in vogue, it bordered on heresy. Nonetheless, John never shied away from controversy or breaking with orthodoxies, we suspect because he was more often right than wrong!
Another, lesser known, yet deep and abiding, interest of his was the study of the paranormal, by which he meant the great many aspects of mind and world that go beyond our current explanatory framework. Indeed, it was their mutual interest in this that first connected him with Huxley. John wrote extensively on the subject and, back in the 1950s, advanced the hypothesis that perceptual space occupies a separate set of dimensions from physical space, as well as suggesting means to test this. Interestingly, a view subsequently endorsed by the theoretical physicist Bernard Carr.
But a list of John’s discoveries, his writings, or his numerous accolades and honours do not really capture the spirit of who he was. He was truly a rara avis, a “gentleman scientist” from another era, when science was a round-the-clock obsession—not just the nine-to-five job it has become today. John was untainted by this and lived a life in leisurely contemplation of nature. We will remember the playful mischievous twinkle in his eyes—as though he was perpetually flirting with nature, trying to trick her into revealing her secrets, and very often succeeding!
John died from heart failure on 28 January 2019, leaving his wife, Vanna; two sons (Adrian, a banker, and Christopher, a neurosurgeon); their wives; and seven grandchildren.
Republished with kind permission of the British Medical Journal, with additional information from the RCP’s records.
Sources/further reading
1 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1873 (Accessed 18 October 2023)
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Raymond_Smythies (Accessed 18 October 2023)