Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century

Author:   Jeremy A. Greene (The John Hopkins University) ,  Flurin Condrau ,  Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:  

9780226390734


Pages:   320
Publication Date:   23 November 2016
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
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Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century


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Overview

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.  

Full Product Details

Author:   Jeremy A. Greene (The John Hopkins University) ,  Flurin Condrau ,  Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:   Width: 1.60cm , Height: 0.20cm , Length: 2.30cm
Weight:   0.567kg
ISBN:  

9780226390734


ISBN 10:   022639073
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   23 November 2016
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

Table of Contents

Reviews

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 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 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


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 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 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


Author Information

Jeremy A. Greene is professor of medicine and the history of medicine and the Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease and Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine. Flurin Condrau is professor and director of the Institute and Museum of the History of Medicine at the University of Zurich and coeditor of Tuberculosis Then and Now: Current Issues in the History of an Infectious Disease. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins is dean of the Graduate Division, vice chancellor of Student Academic Affairs, and professor of the history of health science at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970 and The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America, coeditor of Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History, and, with Jeremy Greene, editor of Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America.

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