It is 50 years since John Cade published his first experiences with lithium treatment in the Medical Journal of Australia. Fortunately, the editors of the journal did not demand an extremely high scientific standard for work to be published at that time. With the present-day requests of most reviewed scientific journals, this work, that reported on the effect of lithium on guinea pigs and in an uncontrolled series of 6 patients, would never have been published. Through the discovery of lithium, research on bipolar disorder, and its therapy, made a huge advance.
