1955

Meprobamate (Miltown) brought to market in U.S. (Metzl, 73, 98ff.). At May, 1955 meeting of APA, interest in meprobamate dwarfed interest in chlorpromazine and reserpine, because it “promised to be a drug for office-based outpatient psychiatry. . . . Meprobamate opened up the question of the mass treatment of nervous problems found in the community (Healy, I, 65). “Whereas psychoanalysis posited that anxiety resulted from early-life developments with mothers and fathers, developments later mapped onto husbands and wives, meprobamate worked on the thalamus, the substrate, the alimentary tract, and other sexed structures that functioned independently of gender. . . . The argument that Miltown revealed a biological substrate of anxiety, a finding that then unhinged psychoanalysis from its point of capitation, became a common theme among early biological psychiatrists” (Metzl 100, 101). “Miltown set the stage for psychotropic medications to become known as mother’s little helpers, possibly overprescribed to women, and surely considered cures for ‘women’s discontent. . . . Biological psychiatrists may well have announced a new formulation of anxiety, couched in the rejection of the ucs. and the replacement of a cultural model with a scientific one. But, in popular print culture, this formulation was called into question by depictions of the new tranquilizers in Newsweek, Time, Science Digest, Cosmopolitan, and other sites where pharmaceuticals were posited as treatments for marriage phobia, women’s frigidity, castrating mothers, and other psychoanalytically inflected conditions” (102, 103). But cf. Nancy Tone: “Never conceived simply as a tool to tame women, tranquilizers were a medical technology that became feminized in a complicated process that included a wide range of historical actors. Miltown became an overnight sensation, the first psychotropic wonder drug in medical history. In the US, more than 35 million prescriptions were sold in 1957 alone, the equivalent of one prescription per second” (Tone, 377). “ . . . although a gendering of the tranquilizer market was clear by the late 1960s, when women accounted for two-thirds of the consumer market, it was not obvious to doctors, pharmaceutical executives, or patients in the 1950s. . . . Pharmaceutical firms had no financial incentive to confine these drugs to women. Indeed, the surest path to profit was to position them as a panacea for all anxious Americans. In fact at least in the beginning, tranquilizers were very much a man’s drug (Tone II, 107-108).