In October 1956, a peyote ceremony took place at the Red Pheasant reserve in Saskatchewan. Organized by the Native American Church, the ceremony featured the use of peyote, a psychedelic substance from a cactus traditionally found in Mexico. Its use among Canadian Native peoples in the first half of the twentieth century had signalled concerns about American influences, but by the 1950s the...
Dr. Humphry Osmond first published the term “psychedelic” in 1957 as a result of an extensive set of clinical investigations with d-lysergic acid diethylmide (LSD) that took place in Saskatchewan in the 1950s. In the post-World War Two period, Saskatchewan became an attractive destination for medical, and in this case psychiatric, researchers who wanted to pursue theoretical and practical...
The article documents the personal contacts and correspondence between the late nineteenth-century Canadian psychiatrist, R.M. Bucke, and the English poet and socialist, Edward Carpenter. Their correspondence shows Bucke’s consistent evasion of Carpenter’s invitation to discuss Walt Whitman’s poetry of same-sex desire, part of a pattern of denial in the early critical reception of Whitman’s...