DAHSM is glad to announce the publication of a new book, "Prescribed. Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America" edited by Elizabeth S. Watkins, professor of History of Health Sciences and recently appointed Dean of the Graduate Division at UCSF, and by Jeremy A. Greene, Assistant Professor of the History of Science, and the Harvard Medical School Division of Pharmacoepidemiology, and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
The book, published with John Hopkins University Press, is a first of its kind in exploring the politics of therapeutic authority and the relations between knowledge and practice in modern medicine. The tale of the prescription is one of constant struggles over and changes in medical and therapeutic authority and, as pointed out by Watkins and Greene, America has had a long love affair with the prescription. It is much more than the written “script” or a manufactured medicine, professionally dispensed and taken, and worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As an object, it is uniquely illustrative of the complex relations among the producers, providers, and consumers of medicine in modern America. Stakeholders across the biomedical enterprise have alternately upheld and resisted, supported and critiqued, and subverted and transformed the power of the prescription. Who prescribes? What do they prescribe? How do they decide what to prescribe? These questions set a society-wide agenda that changes with the times and profoundly shifts the medical landscape. Examining drugs individually, as classes, and as part of the social geography of health care, contributors to this volume explore the history of prescribing, including over-the-counter contraceptives, the patient’s experience of filling opioid prescriptions, restraints on physician autonomy in prescribing antibiotics, the patient package insert, and other regulatory issues in medicine during postwar America.
Elizabeth S. Watkins is also the author of 'The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America' and 'On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970', both also published by Johns Hopkins, and the coeditor of 'Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History'. Jeremy A. Greene is the author of 'Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease', also published by Johns Hopkins.
The book, published with John Hopkins University Press, is a first of its kind in exploring the politics of therapeutic authority and the relations between knowledge and practice in modern medicine. The tale of the prescription is one of constant struggles over and changes in medical and therapeutic authority and, as pointed out by Watkins and Greene, America has had a long love affair with the prescription. It is much more than the written “script” or a manufactured medicine, professionally dispensed and taken, and worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As an object, it is uniquely illustrative of the complex relations among the producers, providers, and consumers of medicine in modern America. Stakeholders across the biomedical enterprise have alternately upheld and resisted, supported and critiqued, and subverted and transformed the power of the prescription. Who prescribes? What do they prescribe? How do they decide what to prescribe? These questions set a society-wide agenda that changes with the times and profoundly shifts the medical landscape. Examining drugs individually, as classes, and as part of the social geography of health care, contributors to this volume explore the history of prescribing, including over-the-counter contraceptives, the patient’s experience of filling opioid prescriptions, restraints on physician autonomy in prescribing antibiotics, the patient package insert, and other regulatory issues in medicine during postwar America.
Elizabeth S. Watkins is also the author of 'The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America' and 'On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970', both also published by Johns Hopkins, and the coeditor of 'Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History'. Jeremy A. Greene is the author of 'Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease', also published by Johns Hopkins. - Log in to post comments