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.
About the Author
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 of the history of medicine at the University of Zurich.
Elizabeth Siegel Watkins is dean of the Graduate Division, vice chancellor of Student Academic Affairs, and professor of the history of health sciences 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", co-editor 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".
Reviews
"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
