[8] This classification or drug-patient portrait would describe the effects of certain drugs in relation to characteristic mental conditions responsive to these agents.

Beginning in the 1960s, he was at the vanguard for a biologically based psychiatry at odds with the then dominant Freudian psychoanalytic approach to treatment.

He found their distinctive classification more precise than the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

In 1954 he graduated from the Medical School in Budapest, which was formerly and currently known as Semmelweis University and then became Resident Psychiatrist at the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology from 1954 to 1956.

His thesis Conditioning and Psychiatry was published in 1964 with a foreword by W. Horsley Gantt, at the time one of the last living pupils of physiologist Ivan Pavlov.

His abilities were quickly noted; by 1961 Ban became the co-principal investigator with Heinz Lehmann in the Early Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit (ECDEU), a clinical drug evaluation program sponsored by the US Public Health Service, which met to exchange observations and findings on new psychotropics.

[21] In the mid-1980s he recognized that none of the newer drugs were better in their therapeutic efficacy than the original breakthroughs such as chlorpromazine for schizophrenia or imipramine for depression.

Similarly, and in contradistinction to some of the recent “atheoretical” classifications, Ban’s “composite system” is based on the theory that each psychiatric illness unfolds in its “dynamic totality” (from onset to outcome) within a structure determined by the disease.”[22] In 1995 Vanderbilt University appointed him professor of psychiatry, emeritus.

In his remaining years he passionately devoted himself to the history of neuropsychopharmacology, including co-editing with Edward Shorter and David Healy a four-volume autobiographical account series for the Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologicum (CINP), and as editor-in-chief of a ten-volume oral history psychopharmacology series for the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP).

He was a founder and the first executive editor of The International Network for the History of Neuropsychopharmacology (INHN) website from its inception in 2013 until his death.