In studies with American scientists, Meduna explored carbon dioxide therapy for depression and anxiety and described oneirophrenia as a treatable psychiatric illness.

His grandfather Giuseppe Carlo (József), a descendant of the Meduna family, came from Castelcucco, Italy, to Hungary, where he became a successful and awarded salami maker.

He was appointed to the Hungarian Interacademic Institute for Brain Research, also in Budapest, where he worked under the direction of Károly Schaffer.

After trials with the alkaloids strychnine, thebaine, coramine, caffeine, and brucin, he settled on camphor dissolved in oil as effective and reliable.

In addition to being a powerful analeptic drug, pentylenetetrazol is a potent cardiac and respiratory stimulant; consequently, patients experienced sensations most considered unpleasant.

After his results were quickly reproduced in many other centers around the world, this form of therapy became widely used and recognized as the first effective[citation needed] treatment for schizophrenia.

A more facile form of induction of seizures, using electricity instead of chemicals, was developed by the Italian psychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini.

Meduna also developed carbon dioxide therapy in which the patient breathed a gaseous mixture of 30% carbon dioxide and 70% oxygen called carboxygen or carbogen (and sometimes "Meduna's Mixture") that was designed to provoke a powerful feeling of suffocation, quickly triggering an unresponsive yet intense altered mental state.

[7] With the increase of antisemitism and the rise to power of Nazism, Meduna emigrated to the United States in the following year (1938), to become professor of neurology at Loyola University in Chicago.