Background
Oswald, Ian was born on August 4, 1929 in London. Son of John Stevenson Lawson and Lily (Hawkins) Oswald.
Oswald, Ian was born on August 4, 1929 in London. Son of John Stevenson Lawson and Lily (Hawkins) Oswald.
Bachelor, Cambridge (England) University, 1950. Bachelor of Medicine, BChir, Cambridge (England) University, 1954. Doctor of Medicine, Cambridge (England) University, 1958.
Doctor of Science, Edinburgh (Scotland) University, 1963.
In 1947, he became a medical student at Caius College, Cambridge, gaining a First Class Honours degree in the Participant 2 Tripos in Psychology. He spent two years at Oxford, and for his research received the Doctor of Medicine (Cambridge) in 1959. He became a lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine of Edinburgh University in 1959.
In 1963 he was awarded the Gaskell Gold Medal in Clinical Psychiatry of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, and in the same year the degree of Doctor of Science of Edinburgh University.
In 1965-1967, on leave from Edinburgh, he established a Department of Psychiatry in the University of Western Australia. In the 1980s in research with Kirstine Adam, he reported that the sleeping drug triazolam (Halcion), when taken nightly caused adverse mental effects by day.
This led on to 1991 when triazolam was banned in the United Kingdom because, as the Committee on Safety of Medicines said after studying further unpublished research by the Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo (Halcion"s manufacturers), "triazolam causes frequent and disabling psychiatric adverse reactions at doses of 0.5 and 1mg when used in a population of young and middle-aged patients with no mental illness". (The Daily Telegraph October 2, 1991).
In 1992, the Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo, the makers of Halcion, sued him in London for libel and he countersued in a 62-day trial.
(Sleeping And Waking: Physiology And Psychology, by Oswald...)
Served with Royal Air Force, 1955-1957. Fellow Royal College Psychiatrists.
Married Joan Thomsett, August 8, 1951 (divorced March 1982). Children: Andrew John, Sally, Malcolm, James. Married Kirstine Adam, April 15, 1982.