Person

Ban, Thomas A.

1929-1922

Thomas Arthur Ban was born on November 16, 1929, in Budapest, Hungary.

He was a Hungarian-born Canadian psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, academic, researcher, and theorist. In 1954, he graduated from the Medical School of the Semmelweis University in Budapest and became a Resident Psychiatrist at the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology from 1954 to 1956. After the Hungarian Uprising in 1957/58, he emigrated to Canada and served as a rotating intern at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax from 1957 to 1958, and as a resident psychiatrist in Montreal at the Verdun Protestant Hospital (VPH) from 1958 to 1959, and at the Allan Memorial Institute from 1959 to 1960. In 1960, Ban joined the staff at VPH as Senior Psychiatrist and Chief of the Clinical Research Service. He received his Diploma in Psychiatry from McGill University in 1960, with a thesis on “Conditioning and Psychiatry,” published in 1964. In 1969, he published the first textbook in the emerging field, "Psychopharmacology." In 1970, Ban was awarded the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry Annual Research Fund Award. In 1971, he became the founding director of the first Division of Psychopharmacology in the world at the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. He was a critic of psychiatric practice, accusing the discipline of lacking a coordinated body of knowledge. Beginning in the 1960s, he was at the vanguard for a biologically based psychiatry at odds with the then-dominant Freudian psychoanalytic approach to treatment. He received the first annual Canadian Psychiatric Association’s McNeil Award in 1969. He won the award again in 1970 and 1973. Additionally, he was on the boards of two Hungarian neuropsychiatric journals, in addition to journals in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, and the United States. In 1976, he became a full professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and the director of the clinical research division of the Tennessee Neuropsychiatric Institute. In 1995, Vanderbilt University appointed him professor of psychiatry, emeritus. In his remaining years, he passionately devoted himself to the history of neuropsychopharmacology, including co-editing with Edward Shorter and David Healy a four-volume autobiographical account series for the Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologicum (CINP), and as editor-in-chief of a ten-volume oral history psychopharmacology series for the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He was a founder and the first executive editor of The International Network for the History of Neuropsychopharmacology (INHN) website from its inception in 2013 until his death. In 2003, he was bestowed with the Paul Hoch Distinguished Service Award of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

He died on February 4, 2022.