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Therapeutic Revolutions

Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century

When asked to compare the practice of medicine today to that of a hundred years ago, most people will respond with a story of therapeutic revolution: Back then we had few effective remedies, but now we have more (and more powerful) tools to fight disease, from antibiotics to psychotropics to steroids to anticancer agents.

This collection challenges the historical accuracy of this revolutionary narrative and offers instead a more nuanced account of the process of therapeutic innovation and the relationships between the development of medicines and social change. These assembled histories and ethnographies span three continents and use the lived experiences of physicians and patients, consumers and providers, and marketers and regulators to reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the actual ways these claims have been used and understood in specific sites, from postwar West Germany pharmacies to twenty-first century Nigerian street markets. By asking us to rethink a story we thought we knew, Therapeutic Revolutions offers invaluable insights to historians, anthropologists, and social scientists of medicine.
 

320 pages | 4 halftones, 8 line drawings, 5 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2016

History: American History, History of Technology

History of Science

Medicine

Reviews

"This treatise makes for most informative and interesting reading, due in part to careful editing that provides a oneness of style even though each of the 11 chapters was written by a different author. This continuity reflects the objective of the work: to evaluate the changes—economic, social, political, and civil, both positive and negative—that have been brought about by the introduction and practical application of new pharmaceuticals, giving rise to “new medicine” or “modern therapeutics.” The three phases of any revolution (think industrial revolution), the past (origin, development), the present (current status), and the future (predictions), are all carefully examined. Highly recommended."

CHOICE

“The way each contributor addresses the topic of therapeutic revolution is both fresh… and compelling.”

Metascience

"Therapeutic Revolutions makes a valuable contribution to the history of twentieth-century medicine. The geographic breadth of the analysis complicates and provides texture to our understanding of the medical, political, and cultural changes wrought by the introduction of new pharmaceuticals in the mid-twentieth century. The book’s engaging and clear prose will make this an excellent contribution to undergraduate teaching on twentieth-century medicine."

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

"Indeed, we can learn much about physicians, patients, and societies in studies of the performances—whether clinical trials, newsworthy breakthroughs, or advertising campaigns—contrived to exhibit the curative effects of new medicines. This collection helps to show that the historiography of pharmaceuticals has already proceeded
far down that path."

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“Provocative and compelling, this engrossing collection presses us to think hard about what is at stake in speaking about the therapeutic changes of the mid-twentieth century as a therapeutic revolution, what interests are served and cultural work performed by scripting stories of the coming of medical modernity as narratives of revolution, and how such storytelling—popular, professional, and scholarly—obscures understanding of pharmacotherapeutics, social change, and social efficacy in the past and for the future. Therapeutic Revolutions is thoroughly engaging and powerfully consequential.”

John Harley Warner, Yale University School of Medicine

“This is a wonderful, insightful, and wide-ranging collection examining how medicine changes, for whom, and how differently the promise of a therapeutic revolution has played out over the years and across the globe.”

Keith Wailoo, Princeton University

Table of Contents

Introduction: Medicine Made Modern by Medicines
JEREMY A . GREENE, FLURIN CONDRAU, AND ELIZABETH SIEGEL WATKINS

1 Futures and their Uses
Antibiotics and Therapeutic Revolutions
SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ANNE KVEIM LIE

2 Reconceiving the Pill
From Revolutionary Therapeutic to Lifestyle Drug
ELIZABETH SIEGEL WATKINS

3 Magic Bullet in the Head?
Psychiatric Revolutions and Their Aftermath
NICOLAS HENCKES

4 Revolutionary Markets?
Approaching Therapeutic Innovation and Change through the Lens of West German IMS Health Data, 1959– 1980
NILS KESSEL AND CHRISTIAN BONAH

5 Recurring Revolutions?
Tuberculosis Treatments in the Era of Antibiotics
JANINA KEHR AND FLURIN CONDRAU

6 Pharmaceutical Geographies
Mapping the Boundaries of the Therapeutic Revolution
JEREMY A. GREENE

7 After McKeown
The Changing Roles of Biomedicine, Public Health, and Economic Growth in Mortality Declines
PAUL FARMER, MATTHEW BASILICO, AND LUKE MESSAC

8 Chemotherapy in the Shadow of Antiretrovirals
The Ambiguities of Hope as Seen in an African Cancer Ward
JULIE LIVINGSTON

9 Volatility, Speculation, and Therapeutic Revolutions in Nigerian Drug Markets
KRISTIN PETERSON

10 Therapeutic Evolution or Revolution?
Metaphors and Their Consequences
DAVID S. JONES

11 A Therapeutic Revolution Revisited
CHARLES E. ROSENBERG

List of Contributors
Index

 

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