Synopses & Reviews
With Americans paying more than $200 billion each year for prescription pills, the pharmaceutical business is the most profitable in the nation. The popularity of prescription drugs in recent decades has remade the doctor/patient relationship, instituting prescription-writing and pill-taking as an integral part of medical practice and everyday life.
Medicating Modern America examines the meanings behind this pharmaceutical revolution through the interconnected histories of eight of the most influential and important drugs: antibiotics, mood stabilizers, hormone replacement therapy, oral contraceptives, tranquilizers, stimulants, statins, and Viagra. All of these drugs have been popular, profitable, influential, and controversial, and the authors take a historical approach to studying their development, prescription, and consumption. This perspective locates the histories of prescription medicines in specific cultural contexts while revealing the extent to which contemporary debates about pharmaceutical drugs echo concerns voiced by Americans in the past.
Exploring the rich and multi-faceted history of pharmaceutical drugs in the United States, Medicating Modern America unveils the untold stories behind America's pharmaceutical obsession.
Contributors include: Robert Bud, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jeremy A. Greene, David Healy, Suzanne White Junod, Ilina Singh, Andrea Tone, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins.
Review
“This is a fascinating and important collection of articles by one of the most influential elder statesmen of social psychology. Not only does it provide valuable insights into the history of modern social psychology, it also points the way to a more significant future social psychology.”
-Morton Deutsch E.L. ,Thorndike Professor Emeritus, Teachers College, Columbia University
Review
“It is hopeful, in troubled times, to find a social scientist in his ninth decade writing lucidly, self-critically, and wisely about the essential problems and potentialities of his chosen field. And it is an additional pleasure to find that the humanistic values of his youth are burnished rather than tarnished in his old age.”
-Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,
Review
“This is a fascinating and important collection of articles by one of the most influential elder statesmen of social psychology. Not only does it provide valuable insights into the history of modern social psychology, it also points the way to a more significant future social psychology.”
“It is hopeful, in troubled times, to find a social scientist in his ninth decade writing lucidly, self-critically, and wisely about the essential problems and potentialities of his chosen field. And it is an additional pleasure to find that the humanistic values of his youth are burnished rather than tarnished in his old age.”
Review
“Provides a series of highly accessible and engaging analyses of prescriptions drugs.”
-Social Hiistory of Medicine,
Review
“Richness of analysis and illustration . . . make up this book.”
-Technology and Culture,
Review
&“;The most valuable role of Medicating Modern America is as a teaching text. There are currently very few texts available for undergraduate teachers that offer digestible and critical assessments of the role of prescription drugs in the history of twentieth-century biomedicine; Medical Modern America—by providing a series of highly accessible and engaging analyses of prescriptions drugs—superbly fills this gap.”
-;Social History of Medicine,
Review
“Their excellent example of balanced analysis should inspire other scholars to pursue further work in the new pharmaceutical history.”
-Gregory J. Higby,The Journal of American History
Review
“These challenging essays mark the transformation of medication from a tradition of need assessed by physicians, to a culture that far exceeds a basic threshold for drugs on demand on the part of the public.”
-Choice,
Synopsis
A pivotal figure in social psychology and personality studies for more than half a century, M. Brewster Smith was the recipient of the Gold Medal Award of the American Psychological Foundation for Lifetime Contributions by a Psychologist to the Public Interest.
Smith has conducted groundbreaking work on the ways in which peoples opinions are influenced by their strategies for coping with the world, with their social relations, and with their inner conflicts. His pioneering book, Opinions and Personality, offered an in-depth treatment of how peoples political opinions reflect and are partly shaped by the ways those views contribute to the functioning of their personalities. More recently, Smith has drawn on psychological research to suggest ways to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Throughout his work, Smith has aspired to an interdisciplinary social psychology that is scientific in its respect for empirical evidence and which can be applied to the social issues of our time.
For a Significant Social Psychology collects Smith's most important writings, introduced by the author and presented thematically.
Synopsis
A pivotal figure in social psychology and personality studies for more than half a century, M. Brewster Smith was the recipient of the Gold Medal Award of the American Psychological Foundation for Lifetime Contributions by a Psychologist to the Public In.
Synopsis
A pivotal figure in social psychology and personality studies for more than half a century, M. Brewster Smith was the recipient of the Gold Medal Award of the American Psychological Foundation for Lifetime Contributions by a Psychologist to the Public Interest.
Smith has conducted groundbreaking work on the ways in which people's opinions are influenced by their strategies for coping with the world, with their social relations, and with their inner conflicts. His pioneering book, Opinions and Personality, offered an in-depth treatment of how people's political opinions reflect and are partly shaped by the ways those views contribute to the functioning of their personalities. More recently, Smith has drawn on psychological research to suggest ways to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Throughout his work, Smith has aspired to an interdisciplinary social psychology that is scientific in its respect for empirical evidence and which can be applied to the social issues of our time.
For a Significant Social Psychology collects Smith's most important writings, introduced by the author and presented thematically.
About the Author
Andrea Tone is Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine at McGill University. She is the author, most recently, of
Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America.
Elizabeth Siegel Watkins is associate professor of the History of Health Sciences at the University of California at San Francisco and the author of On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970.