Deniker, Pierre-Georges

   (1917–1998)

   Pioneer of psychopharmacology, Deniker was born into a French diplomatic family. After finishing his medical studies in 1945 and his internship in 1946–1949, he became an assistant physician (chef de clinique) until 1952 in the Paris Faculty of Medicine, also serving from 1949 on as a staff psychiatrist under Jean Delay in the Paris psychiatric hospitals. In 1961, having passed the Agrégation, he became a professor (professeur agrégé) in the faculty of medicine; from 1971 until his retirement in 1985 he was head of the newly created (after Delay’s retirement) university department of mental health and therapeutics of the Ste.-Anne mental hospital. The work of Delay and Deniker in 1952 on chlorpromazine had great importance for the development of psychiatry as a discipline, turning it from a profession based on an empirical approach to syndromes (in the United States based on psychotherapy) to one based on the prescription of medication. In 1954, Delay and Deniker made, simultaneously with Nathan Kline in the United States, the discovery of reserpine’s usefulness as a psychotropic drug. In 1952, Delay and Deniker described "neuroleptics" (known in the United States as antipsychotics) as an independent drug class for psychosis; in 1955, they convened a landmark scientific colloquium in Paris, the first international psychopharmacology meeting, to discuss these new drugs. In 1957, Deniker received a Lasker Award. In a series of books and papers during the years—especially in his textbook of psychopharmacology (Méthodes chimiothérapiques en psychiatrie) cowritten with Delay in 1961—Deniker laid much of the conceptual basis of the discipline of psychopharmacology. Deniker and his colleagues also emphasized the efficacy of low doses of antipsychotic drugs at a time when the international community was moving toward steadily higher doses and caused wonder that all the unpleasant side effects of the high doses were not being seen in the Paris hospitals.