This project will trace the history of chemicals that came to be known as """"""""truth sera."""""""" It will compare their histories in America, Britain, and France, tracing their role in """"""""police science"""""""" in the first half of this century, and their use within psychiatry from the 1920s through the 1950s. More generally, it will seek to understand why and how the plausibility of such chemical agents has waxed and waned during this century. The primary research focus for the period of this grant will be 1920-1960, but the longterm objective is to bring this history up to the present, by including the role of pharmacological agents in the recent """"""""recovered memory"""""""" debates. The proposed research will examine unpublished records from the relevant forensic laboratories (and, where possible, hospitals) where """"""""truth sera"""""""" were tested. In order to examine how the efficacy and ethical status of the agents was evaluated in public arenas, research will then focus on several court cases and associated published material, as well as local and national newspaper coverage. More generally, the project will draw on primary source research in national libraries archival materials in the places where relevant research and debate were most intensive. The benefits of this work will be several: it will provide the first historical account of an area of medical research that has had significant impact in forensic medicine, psychiatry, and popular culture. It will therefore provide new perspectives for the historical understanding of issues in the history of forensic science, psychiatry, and popular attitudes to medical authority. Finally, the historical analysis of the changing plausibility of """"""""truth serum"""""""" techniques over several decades, and of the changing ways that researchers attempted to surmount certain key problems of evidence, may have benefits beyond the historical record. They may provide a new perspective on the ongoing issue of how accurate memories can be recovered through psychological intervention - an issue that continues to be debated in the psychiatric literature.
