Response to Some Stimulant and Depressant Drugs of the Central Nervous System

Abstract

Nearly one hundred years ago, Anstie (1864) wrote: “Among the too frequent instances which are to be found in medical nomenclature, of confusion and uncertainty in the application of descriptive terms, there is none, perhaps, more striking than is occupied by the words Narcotic and Stimulant.” Both classes of substance embrace drugs of antiquity. Thus of the depressants, alcohol dates from the time of the Thracian god, Dionysus, while the earliest use of stimulants such as caffeine and xanthine is lost in the obscurity of the past (Goodman and Gilman, 1955a). Even today, there exists no systematized codification of response to the two classes of drug, although it is implicitly assumed that stimulants and depressants are invariably and mutually antagonistic in their effect on the central nervous system. Advantage was therefore taken of phenomena arising during drug intoxications to categorize abnormal features in the central nervous system common to each of the two classes of intoxicant and to essay a comparison, the one with the other.