A brief biography of lithium – how a drug discovered by accident helped to soothe the unstable, revolutionized psychiatry, and yet has remained a worldly resource that will never make anyone rich.

The medical writing of recent years is a feast of literary talent, showing healing as part of social history and our pursuit of immortality. A recently published book by Walter A. Brown, a psychiatrist and academic from Rhode Island, has earned its place on the shelves alongside the world league of the genre, such as Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Henry Marsh and Jürgen Thorwald. Brown’s Lithium: A Doctor, a Drug, and a Breakthrough is the story of an inconspicuous medicine whose beneficial and not fully explainable effect on patients suffering from bipolar disorder changed the last 50 years of psychiatry. However, it is still unknown why lithium salts suppress dangerous manic episodes so effectively and quickly, or how they save patients from relapses into alternating states of deep depression and