Adventures in Psychiatry: The Scientific Memoirs of Dr. Abram Hoffer

This book is a feast for the mind and the spirit: the autobiography of one of the great doctors of the 20th century, Dr. Abram Hoffer. For those of us who have learned, through painful personal experience that drugs, surgery, and most of high-tech medicine offer only very temporary benefits, but rarely if ever a cure, this book tells the wonderful story of the rebirth of nutritional medicine. Based on the science of biochemistry, now known as orthomolecular medicine. Here we follow the journey of its founder: from his Saskatchewan farm childhood, subsequent training in bio-chemistry and agricultural science, his early insights into the central importance to human and animal health of soil and plant food quality, to his specialization in psychiatry, professorship at the University of Saskatchewan, and his daily work with patients. We learn of his disillusionment with traditional methods of treating the mentally ill and we share his excitement of discovery as we follow his dramatic case histories, which unfold like detective-stories, as he uncovers the connection between deficiencies in specific vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids and mental illness.