Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century
Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Condrau, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
Abstract
Histories of medicine in the twentieth century are often illustrated with specific pharmaceuticals: antibiotics that defeated infectious diseases, vaccines that prevented childhood diseases, antineoplastic drugs that fought cancers, cardiovascular drugs that helped stem the epidemic of heart disease, immuno-suppressants that made complex organ transplants possible, psychotropic drugs that controlled the demons of psychosis and lifted the veil of depression. These stories have become familiar catechisms of the biomedical present: they suggest sudden and dramatic forms of social change that foll ... More
Histories of medicine in the twentieth century are often illustrated with specific pharmaceuticals: antibiotics that defeated infectious diseases, vaccines that prevented childhood diseases, antineoplastic drugs that fought cancers, cardiovascular drugs that helped stem the epidemic of heart disease, immuno-suppressants that made complex organ transplants possible, psychotropic drugs that controlled the demons of psychosis and lifted the veil of depression. These stories have become familiar catechisms of the biomedical present: they suggest sudden and dramatic forms of social change that followed in the wake of a series of magic bullets discovered over the course of the twentieth century. The collected essays of this volume seek to challenge the linearity of this historical narrative, provide thicker descriptions of the process of therapeutic transformation, and explore the complex relationships between medicines and social change. Working on three continents and touching upon the lived experiences of patients and physicians, consumers and providers, marketers and regulators, and many other actors and agents, the contributors to this volume cumulatively reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the specificity of local sites in which they are put into practice. Collectively they ask: what is revolutionary about therapeutics?
Keywords:
history of medicine,
history of science,
pharmaceutical industry,
therapeutic revolution,
medical anthropology,
prescription drugs,
biomedicine,
twentieth century history,
consumer history,
modern medicine
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226390734 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226390901.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jeremy A. Greene, editor
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Flurin Condrau, editor
University of Zurich
Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, editor
University of California, San Francisco
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