CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

When he wanted to find out what the end organs ( the sensitive endings within the skin) were, he performed psychophysiological experiments with a cold bath alternatmg with a hot bath to determine the temperature sensitive endings in the foreskin on his penis. He marked these with ink, had himself circumcised and found through microscopic sectioning and staining techniques the end organs responsible for the sensations that he had recorded.

Later, when it was important for him to know the temperature within the human brain, he had thermocouples inserted in his own brain through his jugular vein from the neck region. He measured the temperature within the brain and blood flow through his own brain. He never asked anyone else to do what he had not already done on himself.

This was the scientific policy that I was following when I did the isolation tank work at the National Institute of Mental Health and m the Virgin Islands. I followed the same policy when I did the isolation work with the LSD. I did not ask any other subjects to do it umtil after I had done it myself. Sometimes, one does not use another subject after one has done it one. self, because one realizes either that it is not necessary on a second subject or that it is too dangerous to do on a second subject, One then waits for another mature scientific investigator to do it on himself. This point of view was used by Walter Reed in his experiments to find the cause of yellow fever. This has been a medical and scientific research tradition among the older mature investigators for many years.

In recent years there has been much talk and much regulation both within the National Institutes of Health themselves and in their grants to medical schools. They prohibit the use of human subjects until a jury of one's peers judges whether or not the experiments should be done. This was the restriction placed upon the psychotherapy

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