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Secobarbital

Barbiturate

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Secobarbital, sold under the brand name Seconal among others, is a short-acting barbiturate drug originally used for the treatment of insomnia. It was patented by Eli Lilly and Company in 1934 in the United States. It possesses anesthetic, anticonvulsant, anxiolytic, sedative, and hypnotic properties. In the United Kingdom, it was known as quinalbarbitone. Secobarbital is considered to be an obsolete sedative–hypnotic and has largely been replaced by the benzodiazepine family. It was widely abused, known on the street as "red devils" or "reds". Among barbiturates, secobarbital carries a particularly high risk of abuse and addiction, largely responsible for its deprecation and disuse by the 1970s.

Editorial summary

“Secobarbital” enters the record as barbiturate. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Secobarbital and Barbiturate can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1934—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Secobarbital and Barbiturate.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Secobarbital” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Secobarbital and Barbiturate provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1934.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Secobarbital”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Secobarbital primary sources, Secobarbital archive and Secobarbital research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Secobarbital”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Secobarbital” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.