Head and shoulders image of Dr. Abram Hoffer, associate professor, Research Psychiatry, Department of Medicine.

Bio/Historical Note: Dr. Abram Hoffer was born in 1917 at the small Jewish settlement of Sonnenfeld, Saskatchewan, near Estevan. He studied successively at the University of Saskatchewan (BSc 1938; MS 1940), the University of Minnesota (PhD 1944), and the University of Toronto (MD 1945). After graduation he took a position as director of psychiatric research in the Psychiatric Services branch of the Saskatchewan Department of Public Health. Dr. Hoffer began work on the effects of hallucinogens in the 1950s. He believed that megavitamin therapy and other nutritional interventions were potentially effective treatments for schizophrenia and other diseases. Dr. Hoffer was also involved in studies of LSD as an experimental therapy for alcoholism and the discovery that high-dose niacin can be used to treat high cholesterol and other dyslipidemias. Dr. Hoffer's ideas about megavitamin therapy to treat mental illness were not accepted by the medical community. In 1959 he addressed the Conference on Parapsychology and Psychedelics in New York, and in the following year published, with Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the Chemical Concepts of Psychiatry (1960). Dr. Hoffer and Dr. Osmond also worked together on Hallucinogens (1967) and both contributed to Clinical and Other Uses of the Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic Test (1975). In the 1970s he concentrated his research on problems of nutrition. Dr. Hoffer’s books include How to Live with Schizophrenia (1978), Orthomolecular Nutrition (with Morton Walker, 1978), Nutrients to Age Without Senility (1980), and Ortho-Molecular Nutrition (with Morton Walker, 1981). Dr. Hoffer died in 2009 in Victoria, British Columbia, at age 91.