Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service and today we're going back

to the early days of the drug Ritalin, a stimulant used to treat what's now called

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD.

I'm Lucy Burns and I've been speaking to Professor Keith Connors,

one of the researchers on the first randomized clinical trial of Ritalin

for children in the early 1960s. a of your small finger. Their technical name was pink capsule number two.

Ritalin or methyl phenidate had first been synthesized in 1944 by Swiss chemist Leandro Panazon.

The urban legend is that he named it after his wife Marguerite or Rita.

She used Ritalin, she took it before tennis matches to give her a bit of a boost.

Apparently she had low blood pressure and this gave her a bit of an edge in these tennis matches.

Matthew Smith is a historian at the University of Strath Clyde and the author of the book

Hyperactive the controversial history of ADHD. Ritalin is an amphetamine like speed.

Initially it had been a pet pill for adults.

It's thought to give people additional focus, help them concentrate,

often how it was marketed towards older patients was that it was stronger than a cup of coffee, but not as strong and had fewer side effects than the more powerful amphetamines, benzodrene and these sorts of things.

In a separate piece of research in the 1930s, Dr Charles Bradley had given children other forms of amphetamines to treat headaches and had found it had the unexpected

side effect of boosting their concentration.

And the children in fact called them math pills because it seemed to allow them to do math for the first time.

Ritalin first appeared on the market in the late 1940s.

It was an era of huge change and great advances in medical science.

The post-war period is the first time when we can finally treat things like tuberculosis

effectively.

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