The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader (eBook)

Sergio Sismondo, Jeremy A. Greene (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-118-89654-9 (ISBN)

Infos

The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader is an engaging survey of the field that brings together provocative, multi-disciplinary scholarship examining the interplay of medical science, clinical practice, consumerism, and the healthcare marketplace.

• Draws on anthropological, historical, and sociological approaches to explore the social life of pharmaceuticals with special emphasis on their production, circulation, and consumption
• Covers topics such as the role of drugs in shaping taxonomies of disease, the evolution of prescribing habits, ethical dimensions of pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, and drug research and marketing in the age of globalization
• Offers a compelling, contextually-rich treatment of the topic that exposes readers to a variety of approaches, ideas, and frameworks
• Provides an accessible introduction for readers with no previous background in this area

Sergio Sismondo is Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada. His current work, including a number of recent articles, explores the pharmaceutical industry’s development and deployment of clinical research, focusing on intersections of marketing and science. He is the author and co-author of a number of books, including An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2010) and The Art of Science (2003). He is Editor of the journal Social Studies of Science.

Jeremy A. Greene is Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His recent work focuses on the ways in which the development and consumption of therapeutics interact with our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal. His broader research interests focus on the history of disease, the history of global health, and the history of the pharmaceutical industry and its interactions with medical research, clinical practice, and public health.  He is the author of Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicines (2014) and Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (2007), as well as co-editor of Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America (2012).

Inhalt

Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction 1
Jeremy A. Greene and Sergio Sismondo

Part I Pharmaceutical Lives 17

2 The Pharmaceuticalisation of Society? A Framework for Analysis 19
Simon J. Williams, Paul Martin and Jonathan Gabe

3 Pharmaceutical Witnessing: Drugs for Life in an Era of Direct?]to?]Consumer Advertising 33
Joseph Dumit

Part II New Drugs, Diseases, and Identities 49

4 Releasing the Flood Waters: Diuril and the Reshaping of Hypertension 51
Jeremy A. Greene

5 DepRession and Consum??tion: Psychopharmaceuticals, Branding, and New Identity Practices 70
Nathan Greenslit

6 BiDil: Medicating the Intersection of Race and Heart Failure 87
Anne Pollock

7 Manufacturing Desire: The Commodification of Female Sexual Dysfunction 106
Jennifer R. Fishman

Part III Drugs and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge 121

8 Following the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors 123
Adriane Fugh?]Berman and Shahram Ahari

9 Getting to Yes: Corporate Power and the Creation of a Psychopharmaceutical Blockbuster 133
Kalman Applbaum

10 Pushing Knowledge in the Drug Industry: Ghost?]Managed Science 150
Sergio Sismondo

11 Transcultural Medicine: A Multi?]Sited Ethnography on the Scientific?]Industrial Networking of Korean Medicine 165
Jongyoung Kim

Part IV Political and Moral Economies of Pharmaceutical Research 179

12 Uncommon Trajectories: Steroid Hormones, Mexican Peasants, and the Search for a Wild Yam 181
Gabriela Soto Laveaga

13 "Ready?]to?]Recruit" or "Ready?]to?]Consent" Populations? Informed Consent and the Limits of Subject Autonomy 195
Jill A. Fisher

14 Clinical Trials Offshored: On Private Sector Science and Public Health 208
Adriana Petryna

15 The Experimental Machinery of Global Clinical Trials: Case Studies from India 222
Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Part V Intellectual Property in Local and Global Markets 235

16 Intellectual Property and Public Health: Copying of HIV/AIDS Drugs by Brazilian Public and Private Pharmaceutical Laboratories 237
Maurice Cassier and Marilena Correa

17 Global Pharmaceutical Markets and Corporate Citizenship: The Case of Novartis' Anti?]Cancer Drug Glivec 247
Stefan Ecks

18 Generic Medicines and the Question of the Similar 261
Cori Hayden

Index 268

Rezensionen

"...provides an in-depth look at the machinery that enables the continued expansion of pharmaceutical products, markets, and subjects." - Ellen Rubinstein for Anthropology Book Forum, Anthropology News

Textauszug

1
Introduction

Jeremy A. Greene and Sergio Sismondo

Why Study Pharmaceuticals?

The evolution of the modern pharmaceutical industry over the 20th century—from its early intersection with the image and later the structure of scientific research, to its dramatic post-WWII expansion and late-century saturation of medical and marketing media—has implications stretching far beyond medicine and business. That evolution has involved and affected much broader social, cultural, economic, and political developments. Pharmaceuticals are not merely used by doctors to control objective diseases, by patients to control subjective symptoms, or by manufacturers and marketers to control lucrative markets. Their uses and meanings are fluid and take shape at the intersection of many interests and disciplines.

Prescription drugs embody our ardent hopes in biomedical futures (for relief of suffering and prevention of morbidity and mortality) and also great fears (of medicalization, medical control, and side effects). Lurking in every capsule or tablet is a version of the pharmakon analyzed by Jacques Derrida—a thing that is both cure and poison.1 But the pharmaceutical does not simply collapse into this binary alone. Drugs take on value because they simultaneously alter the chemistry and biology of our bodies, the expectations and categorization of our experiences, and the potentialities and networks of our social relations.

In the past decade, a number of ethnographic and historical studies, speaking to very different audiences, have framed pharmaceuticals as an ideal “sampling device” to study the interactions of medical science, clinical practice, consumerism, culture, industry, and the marketplace in the 20th and early 21st centuries. This volume draws together seventeen important works from this field over the past decade to give an introduction to this robust and vital new field of study.

We use the term “pharmaceutical studies” to encompass these humanistic and social scientific studies of prescription drugs.2 From the point of view of the anthropologist, historian, sociologist or philosopher, a pharmaceutical can serve as a narrative device for exploring the politics, economics, cultures, and beliefs that potentiate and sustain its use. It can serve as a tracer tool that can be used to elaborate complex global flows of knowledge, capital, and people. Any pharmaceutical on the market today has been the focus of intense research and marketing efforts, expert regulation, and vernacular interest. It is an object that mediates borders between medical science and popular belief, health and disease, and spheres of licit and illicit. It is also—unlike other interesting biomedical matters such as research protocols, standards, or ethical codes—always a thing, a part of the material world invested with specific forms of value and stamped with highly regulated forms of knowledge. In their varied approaches to studying such “informed materials,” scholars working in the area of pharmaceutical studies both demonstrate the interdisciplinarity of science and technology studies (STS) and illustrate some of the field’s broader problematics.3

This volume cannot claim to present a synthesis of all of the important new research in the expanding field of pharmaceutical studies. On the one hand, economic analyses of pharmaceutical markets, ethics, adverse effects, or speculative innovations continue to fill pages in a number of dedicated and general journals on a monthly basis. On the other hand, a steady stream of exposé journalism—some highly nuanced, some crude—documents the role of the pharmaceutical industry in gouging consumers, selling sickness, exploiting research subjects, and selling life-saving drugs at prices that are inaccessible to many who would benefit from them. In selecting the contributions to this volume, however, we have chosen research that highlights social relations often obscured by conventional narratives of triumph and tragedy, of assumed biomedical realism, or conversely of the fabrication of disease by pharmaceutical marketing. We wish to show the value of an STS approach to describing important transformations of biological and social worlds brought about by developments in the field of pharmaceuticals.4 The STS approach opens the door for analyses of drugs in both social and biological environments, by situating the scientific, organizational, and rhetorical work to produce a successful (or failed) pharmaceutical in these contexts. There can be no pharmaceuticals without that work: bare molecules do not become pharmaceuticals without ties to health concerns, scientific knowledge, appropriate regulation, effective marketing, and receptive prescribers and publics. Therefore, while there are many potential fields and areas of pharmaceutical studies, this volume focuses on those that draw from close empirical attention to key social contexts. We have chosen some exemplary articles that illuminate the multiple and complex social connections that pharmaceutical studies can make visible.

A Prehistory of Pharmaceutical Studies

It is not a new thing to argue that one can learn much about a society by studying how it tries to cure what ails it. Critical writings about Western therapeutics have been connected to broader forms of social critique for centuries. When, in June of 1527, the young Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, later known as Paracelsus, publicized his critique of the Galenic pharmacopoeia in favor of the more rational therapeutics of chemical pharmacy, he burned books of Galen and Avicenna on the front steps of the University of Basel, just as Martin Luther had burned a papal bull a few years earlier on the front steps of the Elster Gate of Wittenberg. Likewise, the acerbic pen of the mid-19th century Boston physician and social commentator Oliver Wendell Holmes was appealing to broader popular critiques of orthodoxy when he stated that “I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes.”

The popular genre of therapeutic skepticism grew in size and scope over the 20th century, coincident with the growth of the principal firms that now constitute the global pharmaceutical industry. The work of investigative journalists Samuel Hopkins Adams and Ida Tarbell helped build popular support for the passage of what became the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, which founded the US Food and Drug Administration and the modern age of pharmaceutical regulation in the United States. This lineage of pharmaceutical muckraking can be traced through the middle of the 20th century to a burgeoning genre of literature in the early 21st century and is closely related to the growth of the consumer movements in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.5 Such critical accounts have been matched by an equally popular series of paeans to medical progress, including a host of popular works that continue to celebrate the forward march of the pharmaceutical industry.6 Already by the middle of the 20th century, much popular and scholarly literature on the role of pharmaceuticals in society was heavily polarized between triumphalist and muckraker accounts. One might switch from one ideological position to another—as did journalist Milton Silverman somewhere between his rose tinted Magic in a Bottle (1943) and his much darker Prescriptions for Death (1982) —but relatively few authors found suitable space between the two camps.7

Into this highly polarized field, a few islands of nuanced empirical scholarship on the role of pharmaceuticals in society have developed in the past 50 years. In 1959, the young sociologist Renée Fox—a student of Talcott Parsons who would go on to become perhaps the leading medical sociologist of her generation—published her first book, Experiment Perilous: Physicians and Patients Facing the Unknown, a multilayered account of uncertainty in the ethics and practice of innovative pharmaceutical research at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Although cortisone, one of the experimental pharmaceuticals described in her account, would become an iconic “wonder drug” of the late 1940s and 1950s, in Fox’s account, the pharmaceutical research enterprise was a sphere of ambivalence: no black hats or white hats walked the halls of the Brigham, just an array of people working from their own limited positions of knowledge and possibility. Working from another center of the sociology of science, the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, James S. Coleman, Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel conducted a careful study of the utilization of new pharmaceuticals among the medical communities of several small Midwestern cities as a test site for studying the diffusion of medical knowledge. The resulting text, Medical Innovation, became an immediate staple in the field of the sociology of knowledge upon its original publication in 1966.8

Historians of medicine initially approached the modern pharmaceutical industry with caution: when James Harvey Young published his history of patent medicines, Toadstool Millionaires (1961), the 20th century research-based pharmaceutical industry, appeared as a rational therapeutic solution to the 19th century huckster of patent medicines. In turn, insider histories of the pharmaceutical industry,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.3.2015
• Reihe/Serie: Blackwell Readers in Anthropology
• Reihe/Serie: Blackwell Readers in Anthropology
• Reihe/Serie: Wiley Blackwell Readers in Anthropology
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Pharmakologie / Pharmakotherapie
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Pharmazie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: Anthropologie • Anthropology • <p>Drug industry, prescriptions, contraceptives, big pharma, clinical trials, generic drugs, drug reps, mental health, medical anthropology, health politics, medical ethics, drug patents, sociology of illness, research, scholarship, direct-to-consumer advertising, anthropology of pharmaceuticals, sociology of pharmaceuticals, history of pharmaceuticals, history of medicine, philosophy of medicine, history of science, textbook, collection, readings, published, anthology, medical humanities, cultural anthropo • Medical Anthropology • Medizinische Anthropologie • Social & Cultural Anthropology • Sociology • Sociology of Health & Illness • Sozialanthropologie • Soziale u. kulturelle Anthropologie • Soziologie • Soziologie d. Gesundheit u. Krankheit
• ISBN-10: 1-118-89654-8 / 1118896548
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-89654-9 / 9781118896549