Prior to the development of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s there were a range of experimental treatments for schizophrenia which involved triggering convulsions or comas. Somnifane (or somnifene) was an anaesthetic developed in Germany in the 1920s. When used to induce a coma there was considerable risk of pneumonia developing. An alternative method discovered in Vienna in the 1930s was to use insulin to induce a hypoglycaemic coma. The risk here was that the coma could become irreversible. As these treatments produced only temporary remissions they were soon abandoned. Experiments with both therapies were conducted at Royal Derwent Hospital during the 1930s and insulin comas were still being induced in the 1960s (though by then mainly in alcoholic patients).

A separate clinical file was created for each patient undergoing the treatment and these were stored separately from the correspondence and clinical files in series HSD284, hence the existence of this series.

These records are part of the holdings of the Tasmanian Archives