Dr. Humphry Fortescue Osmond (July 1, 1917 - February 6, 2004) was a British psychiatrist, who is known for coining the phrase psychedelic, which he claimed meant "mind manifesting" and called it "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations."

Dr. Osmond was born in Surrey. He attended Guy's Hospital Medical School of the University of London. During World War II, Dr. Osmond trained to become a psychiatrist, while active a surgeon-lieutenant in the Navy.

Dr. Osmond attracted attention in the 1950s for his work with psychedelics at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada. Dr. Osmond primarily worked with LSD and mescaline and their relation to psychosis and mental illness. In 1952, Dr. Osmond related the similarity of mescaline to adrenaline molecules, in a theory which implied that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by one's own body. In 1953, Dr. Osmond introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline, which inspired the book The Doors of Perception. Dr. Osmond is also known for one study in the late 1950s in which he attempted to cure alcoholics with acute LSD treatment, resulting in a surprising success rate.

For the design of Weyburn Hospital, Osmond began a line of research into what he called "socio-architecture" and produced important research into the effect of hospital architecture on mental patients.

Osmond first offered his new term, psychedelic, at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957. He said the word meant "mind manifesting" and called it "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations." Huxley had sent Osmond a rhyme containing his own suggested coinage: "To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme." (Thymos means soul in Greek.) Rejecting that, Dr. Osmond countered: "To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic."

Later, Osmond became director of the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry at the New Jersey Psychiatric Institute in Princeton, and then a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Dr. Osmond wrote many books and was widely published throughout his career.

He died of cardiac arrhythmia in 2004.

External links

• Obituary: BMJ. 2004 Mar 20;328(7441):713.

• MAPS: A Tribute to Dr. Humphry Osmond, Psychiatrist, 1917-2004