Henri Laborit: Life and Career

Henri Laborit (1914–1995) was a French navy doctor who became a surgeon, then a laboratory researcher, then one of France’s best-known writers on the biology of human behaviour. He was born in Hanoi, in what was then French Indochina, lost his father to tetanus when he was five, and survived both a boyhood bout of tuberculosis and the sinking of his warship off Dunkirk in 1940. His name is tied above all to chlorpromazine, the first drug of the modern antipsychotic era, which he brought out of the operating theatre in the early 1950s while working as a surgeon at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris.

This page tells the story of the man rather than the molecule. It follows him from his childhood between Hanoi and Paris through the naval medical school at Bordeaux, the war, his long search for a way to control surgical shock, and the recognition that followed chlorpromazine — the 1957 Lasker Award, and the Nobel Prize that never came. It then traces the second half of his life: the independent laboratory he founded at the Hôpital Boucicaut in 1958, the journal Agressologie, his popular books, his appearance in Alain Resnais’s 1980 film Mon oncle d’Amérique, and his death in Paris in 1995. The chemistry and the discovery itself have their own pages in this wing, linked below.

Table of Contents

  1. A Childhood Between Hanoi and Paris
  2. The Naval Medical School at Bordeaux
  3. Dunkirk and the Sinking of the Siroco
  4. A Navy Surgeon Searching for an Answer to Shock
  5. The Val-de-Grâce Years
  6. Recognition: the Lasker Award and the Nobel That Never Came
  7. The Boucicaut Laboratory and Agressologie
  8. Writer and Thinker: The Books
  9. Mon Oncle d’Amérique (1980)
  10. Final Years and Death in Paris
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections

1. A Childhood Between Hanoi and Paris

Henri Laborit was born on 21 November 1914 in Hanoi, the capital of Tonkin in French Indochina, a few months after the outbreak of the First World War. Medicine was in the family. His father was a physician serving as a medical officer with the French colonial troops, one of the many army doctors posted to France’s overseas territories in the early twentieth century.

The family’s life changed in 1920. His father died of tetanus, the infection caused by the toxin of Clostridium tetani, which produces the painful muscle spasms once known as lockjaw. Henri was five years old. The loss is recorded in E. Kunz’s 2014 portrait of Laborit, one of the main English-language sources on his life, and in both the English and French encyclopedia biographies. Years later, the boy who lost his father to an infection would spend much of his career studying how the body reacts to injury.

A second blow came when Henri was about twelve: he contracted tuberculosis. In the 1920s there was no antibiotic for the disease — streptomycin, the first, was still almost two decades away — and treatment meant rest, fresh air and time. He recovered. Kunz and the French biographical record both mention the illness as part of his early years.

His secondary schooling took place in Paris, where, according to the French biographical record, he passed his baccalauréat at the Lycée Carnot. By the time he left school, the son of a colonial army doctor had grown up between two worlds: the Asian city of his birth and the French capital where he would spend most of his later life.

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2. The Naval Medical School at Bordeaux

At about twenty, Laborit followed his father into military medicine. He entered the École principale du service de santé de la Marine in Bordeaux, the school that trained doctors for the French navy and colonial service.

The choice shaped the rest of his career in two ways. First, it made him a navy doctor, posted wherever the service sent him. The English-language Wikipedia biography records an early posting at Sidi Abdallah, the naval base near Bizerte in Tunisia. Second, it placed him in a practical branch of medicine, close to injury and emergency. Kunz notes that much of Laborit’s later research, too, was done outside the university system.

After qualifying in medicine he served first as a ship’s and base physician, then turned to surgery. The move from general naval medicine into the operating theatre brought him face to face with the problem that would occupy him for years: patients who survived an operation or a wound, only to die in the hours that followed from surgical shock.

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3. Dunkirk and the Sinking of the Siroco

When the Second World War reached northern France in May 1940, Laborit was a medical officer aboard the French torpedo boat Siroco. In the last days of May, British and French ships were evacuating hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk in what the British called Operation Dynamo. The Siroco took part.

On 31 May 1940 the ship was sunk during the evacuation. Laborit was among the survivors pulled from the water. The French Wikipedia biography puts the number rescued from the ship at about 270, and the English-language one says he was picked up by an English sloop; those details come from those encyclopedia articles and are given here as their account. Both agree on the essential fact: he was aboard when the Siroco went down off Dunkirk, and he lived.

He was awarded the Croix de guerre for his conduct. His war service then continued.

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4. A Navy Surgeon Searching for an Answer to Shock

After Dunkirk, Laborit’s naval career continued in France’s overseas territories; his later postings included Dakar, in French West Africa. Through the war and the years that followed, he worked as a surgeon, and the clinical problem that drew his attention was shock: the collapse of blood pressure and circulation that can follow injury, blood loss or a major operation, and that killed many patients whose wounds had been successfully repaired.

The surgeon-historian T. S. Helling, in a 2020 review titled “Theories of traumatic shock from Bernard to Laborit,” places Laborit at the end of a long line of thinkers about shock that begins with the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard. Laborit’s own contribution was a change of viewpoint. Most surgeons saw the body’s reaction to injury — the surge of stress hormones, the clamping of blood vessels, the racing heart — as a defence to be supported. Laborit came to see that defensive reaction, driven by the autonomic nervous system and the hormone glands, as harmful in its own right when it ran out of control. If it could be damped, he reasoned, the patient might come through the operation in a calmer, less exhausted state.

That idea sent him looking for drugs that could quiet the autonomic nervous system. He turned to the new synthetic antihistamines, a family of drugs developed in France in the 1940s out of the work of Daniel Bovet and his colleagues. In 1950 he published a paper in the French journal Semaine des Hôpitaux on the use of synthetic antihistamines in surgery. One of them, promethazine, struck him: it had marked effects on the central nervous system, well beyond its action on histamine. That observation would lead, within two years, to chlorpromazine.

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5. The Val-de-Grâce Years

By about 1949 to 1951 Laborit was a surgeon at the Val-de-Grâce, the historic military hospital on the Left Bank of Paris. It was there that his ideas about shock turned into a working method. With the anaesthetist Pierre Huguenard he developed what they called “potentiated anaesthesia” — the use of a “lytic cocktail” of drugs (Kunz names promethazine and pethidine, and later chlorpromazine) to block the body’s stress reactions so that less anaesthetic was needed. They combined this drug block with physical cooling of the body and called the result “artificial hibernation.” Their 1951 papers in Presse Médicale and the Journal de Chirurgie described the technique.

Looking for a drug with an even stronger central action than promethazine, Laborit asked the French chemical firm Rhône-Poulenc for one. In December 1950 the company’s chemist Paul Charpentier synthesised a new phenothiazine, code-named RP 4560, which the pharmacologist Simone Courvoisier tested in animals. Laborit tried it at the Val-de-Grâce, and in February 1952, with Huguenard and R. Alluaume, he published “A new vegetative stabilizer (4560 RP)” in Presse Médicale. The historian Thomas Ban translates the paper’s key observation as “disinterest without loss of consciousness and with only a slight tendency to sleep.” Laborit encouraged the hospital’s military psychiatrists to try it on agitated patients; in January 1952 they gave it to a young man with mania, and by late May Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker at the Sainte-Anne hospital were presenting their results with the drug alone. By November 1952 it was on sale in France. The full story — and the long-running question of who deserves the credit — is told on the page From Artificial Hibernation to Psychiatry: The Discovery of Chlorpromazine.

The years at the Val-de-Grâce made his name. In 1953, according to the English-language Wikipedia biography, he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur; the French biographical record gives a later promotion to Officier in 1967. He went on writing about chlorpromazine in the operating theatre for several years, including a 1954 paper on precautions in its use, and a German-language paper on it as a ganglion-blocking agent in surgery.

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6. Recognition: the Lasker Award and the Nobel That Never Came

Within five years chlorpromazine had spread from Paris to hospitals across Europe and North America. In Montreal, Heinz Lehmann and Gorman Hanrahan published an influential report in 1954. The historian Thomas Ban writes that the drug’s effectiveness was reflected in “the transformation of disturbed wards.”

In 1957 the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award — one of the best-known prizes in American medicine — went to the people behind the new psychiatric drugs. According to the Lasker Foundation, the chlorpromazine award was shared by Henri Laborit, Pierre Deniker and Heinz Lehmann, while Nathan Kline and Robert H. Noce were honoured for reserpine, the plant-derived drug from Rauwolfia that entered psychiatry at the same time. The Foundation’s citation for the chlorpromazine award reads: “For the development of chlorpromazine as a therapeutic agent in schizophrenia.” Jean Delay, the senior psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne, was not among the 1957 laureates.

No Nobel Prize was ever given for chlorpromazine. In the same year, 1957, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Daniel Bovet, whose work on antihistamines and muscle relaxants had laid part of the groundwork. The French psychiatrist Guillaume Fond, in a 2013 tribute, notes the contrast: Laborit did not receive a Nobel, unlike Bovet. Some biographical sketches repeat a story that he was considered for the prize; that story is not documented in the sources used for this page, and it is mentioned here only as a story.

Other honours followed over the years. The French biographical record lists a medal from the World Health Organization in 1972, and both Kunz and the French record mention the Anokhin Prize, awarded in the Soviet Union, in 1981.

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7. The Boucicaut Laboratory and Agressologie

In 1958 Laborit left the routine of the operating theatre to found his own research unit: the Laboratoire d’Eutonologie at the Hôpital Boucicaut in Paris. He directed it until his death in 1995. The laboratory carried on his long study of how the organism responds to stress, injury and aggression.

The laboratory’s funding was unusual. According to Kunz and the French biographical record, Laborit financed it largely through patents on molecules developed there, and he worked mostly outside university structures.

The Boucicaut years were productive. Laborit introduced sodium 4-hydroxybutyrate (gamma-hydroxybutyrate, which he called “gamma-OH”) into pharmacology around 1960 and reviewed its effects in a long 1964 paper; the substance itself had first been made in the nineteenth century. Kunz also credits him with discovering or taking part in the development of clomethiazole and of minaprine, an antidepressant that he says stayed on the market until 1990. These later drugs, and the side-effect history of chlorpromazine, are covered on the page Chlorpromazine’s Legacy: Side Effects, Later Research and Laborit’s Later Drugs.

Alongside the laboratory he ran a journal. Agressologie published research on the body’s responses to aggression — in the broad sense of any stress, injury or threat — and Laborit edited it until 1983 (Kunz gives his editorship as running from 1955). He was an enormously prolific author: Kunz counts 624 publications listed in Medline with Laborit as author, almost all of them in French.

His interests also widened beyond medicine. From 1969 to 1976 he belonged to the “Groupe des Dix,” an interdisciplinary circle that met to discuss systems thinking and complexity. From 1978 to 1983 he was visiting professor of bio-psycho-sociology at the Université du Québec, a title that captures how far his work had moved from the operating theatre.

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8. Writer and Thinker: The Books

From 1970 onward Laborit became known in France as much for his books as for his science. Kunz counts more than fifteen, only two of which were translated into English. Among the best known, with the years given in the French biographical record, are:

The thread running through them is the theory he called the “inhibition of action.” In Laborit’s account, an animal or a person facing a threat has, at root, two ways out: to fight or to flee. When neither is possible — when the threat cannot be escaped and cannot be fought — the organism is forced into inhibition, a state of suppressed action that he linked to prolonged stress responses and, in his view, to disease. He set the theory out in his 1979 book and in a long 1988 paper in the Annales Médico-Psychologiques. Kunz’s 2014 article, titled “Henri Laborit and the inhibition of action,” treats this theory as the centre of his later thought.

Éloge de la fuite is where the theory reached the general public. Fond, in his 2013 tribute, credits the book with popularising neuroscience in France. (PubMed indexes Fond’s French tribute under the literal translation “The praise of the leak,” a literal rendering of the book’s title.) Its title points to the book’s argument: in Laborit’s view, flight from a struggle that cannot be won could be a healthier response than inhibition.

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9. Mon Oncle d’Amérique (1980)

In 1980 Laborit’s ideas reached a far larger audience through the cinema. The French director Alain Resnais built his film Mon oncle d’Amérique (“My American Uncle”) around them. The film follows three fictional characters through their careers, setbacks and relationships, and interleaves their stories with Laborit himself, appearing as himself, explaining the behaviour of laboratory animals.

In those sequences Laborit describes experiments in which rats are placed in situations where they can flee a stress, fight another animal, or do neither. In his telling, the animal that can do neither — the one held in the “inhibition of action” — is the one whose health suffers. Resnais set these scenes against the human stories, inviting the audience to see the characters’ frustrations through the same lens. Kunz and both Wikipedia biographies describe his appearance in the film.

The film made Laborit a familiar face in France and carried his theory far beyond the readers of his books. For many people outside medicine, it was the first and only time they encountered the surgeon whose work had opened the antipsychotic era almost three decades earlier.

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10. Final Years and Death in Paris

Laborit kept working at the Boucicaut laboratory for the rest of his life. His wife, Geneviève, was an anaesthesiologist, and Kunz records that the couple had five children. Over his lifetime his work moved from surgery and anaesthesia to pharmacology and the biology of behaviour.

He died in Paris on 18 May 1995, at the age of 80; the French biographical record places his death in the city’s 16th arrondissement. The English-language Wikipedia biography notes that in 1994, the year before his death, a plaque commemorating the discovery of chlorpromazine was unveiled at the Val-de-Grâce, where the story had begun.

Historians still describe his legacy in two parts. The first is the drug. The historians Francisco López-Muñoz and colleagues, in their 2005 history of chlorpromazine, call its clinical introduction one of the great advances of twentieth-century medicine and the start of the “psychopharmacological revolution”; Kunz calls Laborit a founder of neuropsychopharmacology. The second is the thinker: the author of Éloge de la fuite and the face in Mon oncle d’Amérique, who tried to explain human behaviour through the biology of stress. The chemistry behind his drug is traced on the page Phenothiazines: From Coal-Tar Dyes to Chlorpromazine, and the whole wing begins at Henri Laborit: Chlorpromazine and the Birth of Psychopharmacology.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Kunz E. Henri Laborit and the inhibition of action. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2014;16(1):113-7. PubMed PMID: 24733976
  2. Fond G. The praise of the leak: a tribute to Henri Laborit (1914-1995). Tunis Med. 2013;91(8-9):487-9. PubMed PMID: 24227503
  3. Helling TS. “A cold and drowsy humor”: Theories of traumatic shock from Bernard to Laborit. J Trauma Acute Care Surg. 2020;89(3):e41-e47. PubMed PMID: 32618959
  4. Laborit H. Synthetic antihistamines in surgery. Sem Hop. 1950;26(69):3646-9. PubMed PMID: 14781932
  5. Laborit H, Huguenard P. Artificial hibernation by pharmacodynamical and physical means. Presse Med. 1951;59(64):1329. PubMed PMID: 14891672
  6. Laborit H, Huguenard P, Alluaume R. A new vegetative stabilizer; 4560 R.P. Presse Med. 1952;60(10):206-8. PubMed PMID: 14957790
  7. Laborit H. Some precautions in neuroplegic therapy with chlorpromazine (R.P. 4560 or largactil). Therapie. 1954;9(3):302-11. PubMed PMID: 13205514
  8. Laborit H. Ganglion blocking agents in surgery; R. P. 4560. Anaesthesist. 1954;3(1):20-5. PubMed PMID: 13148585
  9. Laborit H. Sodium 4-hydroxybutyrate. Int J Neuropharmacol. 1964;3:433-51. PubMed PMID: 14334876
  10. Laborit H. The inhibition of action. Interdisciplinary approach of its mechanisms and physiopathology. Ann Med Psychol (Paris). 1988;146(6):503-22. PubMed PMID: 2904238
  11. López-Muñoz F, Alamo C, Cuenca E, Shen WW, Clervoy P, Rubio G. History of the discovery and clinical introduction of chlorpromazine. Ann Clin Psychiatry. 2005;17(3):113-35. PubMed PMID: 16433053
  12. Ban TA. Fifty years chlorpromazine: a historical perspective. Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat. 2007;3(4):495-500. PubMed PMID: 19300578

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. Papers by Henri Laborit
  2. Laborit and the history of chlorpromazine
  3. Artificial hibernation (Laborit)
  4. The inhibition of action

Further Reading

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Connections