Prestigious physician recalls ‘stimulating’ start to career at Weyburn Mental Hospital

Dr. Lance “Murray” Cathcart had a prestigious career as a physician, including helping to found the specialty of family medicine in Canada, but it was in Weyburn, as part of the legendary team investigating psychedelics, that he got his start.

Now 94, Cathcart claims to have taken the very first experimental dose of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) at Weyburn under the supervision of Dr. Humphrey Osmond, an English psychiatrist, and his colleague Abram Hoffer, a Saskatchewan biochemist and psychiatrist who established and directed the province’s first psychiatric research program.

[Editor’s Note:  The article below is a personal story and recollection of an experiment done with a psychedelic drug and not in any way a promotion or recommendation to use such substances without medical supervision.]

Osmond was one of the most influential psychiatrists of his day. He coined the term psychedelic, guided well-known author Aldous Huxley through his first mescaline experience, and through his collaborations and letters had an outsized impact on many other leading figures of the time.

“I remember it fairly clearly, although it was several hundred years ago,” Cathcart laughed. “It’s one of those things that doesn’t escape the mind. I was the first one to take LSD at the (Weyburn hospital).

“Osmond was a natural researcher, he had a very curious mind, and he brought that mind to bear at the hospital in Weyburn.”

Cathcart said that he was part of a group that revolved around Osmond and his ground-breaking ideas. Osmond’s company was “stimulating,” he recalled, and he kept every student, staff member, and volunteer busy.

“He was one of those people who constantly poured out ideas and creative topics for research. He had us all working. He had me working, at one point, on a microscopic count of red blood cells. He wanted to know whether they were influenced by an injection of LSD. Turned out they weren’t, but that was my particular job.”

A prestigious career as a physician

Murray was born in Saskatchewan in April 1928. His father was a pharmacist at Weyburn and helped facilitate his son getting a summer job there as a student. Murray was inspired by the environment — it was at the Weyburn Mental Institution, also called the Souris Valley Extended Care Centre, that he decided to become a doctor.

He had a difficult time at first, he said, because so many Second World War veterans were entering the medical field, and they had first choice for open positions.

Cathcart started at the University of Saskatchewan, and after several years he travelled to Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Military Hospital for his residency. Despite not intending to study surgery, he said he ended up becoming a practiced surgeon at Shaughnessy, leading to the next stage of his education back in Saskatchewan.

“I went to Saskatoon City Hospital (after that), for an additional year’s residency, in surgery actually, and from there I went out into the country in Saskatchewan, to a small town called Frontier,” Murray remembered.

After Frontier, Cathcart practiced medicine at a large clinic in Richmond, B.C. for 12 years. In the hippie days, he volunteered at the Vancouver Cool Aid Society.

His work on behavioural science and cultural anthropology won Cathcart a Nuffield Foundation grant that took him and his family around the world in 1968/69.

“They gave me an initial $25,000 to travel around the world studying … residencies in family medicine — how other people were doing it,” Cathcart said. “It was a great trip; I learned a lot in some major cities. Jerusalem was a very fine experience, and Hong Kong was a great experience, as was Hawaii.”

The move to specialization for physicians was thinning the pool of general practitioners, so in 1969 the University of Toronto set up a department of family and community medicine — the first such department in any Canadian faculty of medicine.

Dr. Lance Murray Cathcart became the first head of the new family practice division, in the basement of St. Michael’s Hospital. Within a year, the department went from five to 25 doctors. Cathcart taught family medicine at teaching hospitals throughout the country. From 1979-1980, he was president of the College of Family Physicians in Canada.

Cathcart retired in Toronto at 57 after some health problems. In his retirement, he has taken up sculpting, furniture-making, and gardening — he’s planted over 30,000 trees on his farms near Wiarton, Ontario.

That first ‘trip’

Cathcart still recalls his LSD experience at Weyburn as being one of the most significant experiences of his life. He was 24 at the time, a medical student, and didn’t tell his parents the plan for that day.

“I knew they’d worry themselves sick the whole day,” he said. “I didn’t tell them I’d taken it until after, I knew they’d be on tenterhooks the whole time if they knew I was upstairs in the clinical area of the hospital, and dad was down on the first floor in the pharmacy.”

There was nothing recreational about the experiments, Cathcart noted. Osmond and Hoffer had many theories to investigate, one of which was that LSD and other psychedelics could simulate the mind-state of their patients, especially people with schizophrenia. That theory did not last, but they moved on to others, including work on addictions that has been revived by researchers in the present day.

It was known that LSD was not addictive, habit-forming, or physiologically harmful, but they also knew that ‘trips’ could potentially be traumatizing.

“They didn’t want to (administer an amount) that would do any harm,” Cathcart explained, “so they were very careful with their dosage, and there were numerous qualified people in the room.

“There were two or three psychiatrists, senior psychiatrists, and there were social workers, and clinical nurses, all very interested in what was going on. And later on, some of them did it, too.”

Historical account

MooseJawToday.com reached out to Dr. Erika Dyck at the University of Saskatchewan to see if she could provide any extra information.

Dyck is one of the world’s leading medical historians when it comes to psychiatric work in Saskatchewan. She has consulted on numerous projects, including with the team behind the recent Netflix documentary How to Change Your Mind, helped to build the official archive that includes the Weyburn hospital, and has published many articles and books on the history of eugenics, psychedelics, and mental health in Canada and Saskatchewan.

Dyck has a database of patient experiences at Weyburn that she has been working on for many years. That database is restricted from outside access and cannot simply be browsed. An initial search for the name “Cathcart” did not find anything.

However, Dyck noted that the digital transcription of paper records was not always perfect — and found Murray’s original account with his last name misspelled.

It was June 21, 1952, less than a year after Osmond had moved from England:

“On Saturday, June 21st, 1952, at exactly 10.00 a.m. I took 100 mu. (1 c.c.) of Lysergic acid,” Murray’s account reads. “At this time I felt no emotion other than the excitement of anticipation, such as is felt before an examination, taken when one is not prepared. At 10.30 I began to feel giddy and euphoric. A sudden and unexplainable burst of foolish laughter made me realize that the drug was beginning to take action.”

The account goes on to describe the few hours of the experience with a researcher’s eye for detail, and concludes:

“I would never have missed this experience. I feel I have had more clearly defined the bounds of behaviour I can expect of myself. I also feel I will be able to understand more sympathetically the problems of the patients in the hospital and also those 60% to 70% of patients who may perhaps make up my future practice.”

The archive is not complete and cannot be searched by date, but Dyck said that ’52 was very early, putting it well within the realm of possibility that Cathcart’s account is the very first.

Dyck has pored over nearly 800 written accounts from Weyburn, and noted the extensive screening and patient preparation that characterized the early work of Osmond and his team.

“There’s lot of hype and stories about the unethical ways that people use psychedelics, but I actually think (the Weyburn team) tried to do a pretty good job. … There was always someone appointed as a scribe … and the patients or subjects were never left alone,” she added.

Scott Cathcart, Murray’s son, was delighted to see a copy of his father’s account still existed.

“It serves to highlight the tests again, and how cool they were,” Scott told MooseJawToday.com. “But for me, the story is more about this guy, because, you know, dad came out of nowhere. He had to have a family friend put him through medical school, and he was always doing the unconventional thing. … that would become cutting edge.

“You’re hearing some kid talking about his dad, and sort of revering him,” Scott laughed. “That’s not unusual, but I’m telling you … he was always flying at a superior elevation.”

Note from Osmond

Murray’s 1952 account of his experimental session has an addendum: a personal note from Dr. Humphrey Osmond. His shorthand style of writing has been left as is:

“Dear Murray, Many thanks for yr account of the LSD adventure. It is extremely interesting I think we were lucky to get such a good experimenter as you. … Again thank you for being willing to do this job to further our knowledge of these remarkable illnesses and I believe, also, of human personality, for in spite of all the guff on the books we are still very ignorant. yrs. HO.”

The ’60s subculture backlash — along with notoriously unethical military experiments such as the Central Intelligence Agency’s MK Ultra project — utterly killed that era’s research into psychiatric applications for psychedelics.

As the modern “psychedelic renaissance” continues to enjoy a resurgence in research, early accounts such as Murray Cathcart’s inspire renewed interest in the work of Saskatchewan’s medical pioneers.