Biographies of Remedies: Drugs, Medicines and Contraceptives in Dutch and Anglo-American Healing Cultures (review)

This volume of twelve papers contributes diversely toward a cultural history of twentieth-century remedies and of the "healing cultures" in which such remedies are clinically tested, marketed, dispensed, and utilized. Biographies of Remedies originated in an Anglo-Dutch Workshop convoked at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1998. The workshop's theme, "Remedies and Healing Cultures in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century," does not risk a charge of misbranding—as the book's title does. Participants were encouraged to discuss "remedies," rather than "therapies," thus broadening the medicohistorical canvas and encouraging the inclusion of nonprofessional healing cultures and of the interrelations between the healer and the afflicted. Challenged by such a broad mandate, contributors managed to find some common ground by illustrating the disparate ways in which cultural environment, political influences, and socioeconomic conditions often affect the course taken by remedies as they are launched into society. The topics used to serve that purpose appear to reflect a personal research interest of each contributor—fair enough, but it has produced a loosely structured book. To clue the reader into this richness-in-diversity, a cursory summary will have to do, since space limits and the number of essays preclude individual critiques.

Three papers (Frank Huisman, Rein Vos, and Stuart Anderson) explore influences that have shaped and reshaped the professional identities of Dutch and English practitioners of pharmacy, at the interface between remedy and public. Anderson makes telling use of interviews with patients to shed light on some murky boundaries between medical and pharmaceutical practitioners.

The other nine essays explore selected strands of the life story of individual remedies or types of remedies. A third of these are devoted to contraceptives (Nelly Oudshoorn, Kate Fisher, Lara Marks). As remedies involving sexuality and the "treatment" of healthy people, contraceptives spawn special issues involving, for example, cultural settings, the utilization of test volunteers, and social controls (voluntary or legislated). Fisher shows how valuable oral-history interviews can be in clarifying the interrelations between birth control clinics and working-class people. Another investigation (Willem de Blécourt) illustrates how the topic of sex can cloud a historian's sources, as exemplified historically in the shadowy realm of Dutch "hygiene shops" and the coded language utilized in marketing their so-called hygienic articles.

A paper tracing the erratic course of Dutch homeopathy (Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra) focuses on a central issue (for homeopaths): the preservation of the purity of Hahnemannian precepts; and on an identity crisis among homeopaths trying to find their niche in the world of healers. A quite different strand of twentieth-century experience is an exploration (Virginia Berridge) of the complex and shifting boundaries between licit and illicit drug use, exemplified here by comparison of the opiates and nicotine, and attendant policy plays and control efforts.

Among the dozen essays, it is an account of Taxol, a bark extract from Taxus brevifolia, that arguably fulfills best the concept of a remedy's "biography," combined with actor-network theory (Vivien Walsh and Jordan Goodman). Taxol's complicated story is followed through first the scientific phase, then the decision networks of state agencies, out into political encounters, and ending as a privatized product from an American pharmaceutical manufacturer. The biography of a remedy is also developed in an account of the interferons (Toine Pieters). Here the media's role in triggering an "international interferon mania" (p. 238) is analyzed and related to overly optimistic expectations in the biomedical community. Recounting the collapse of initial clinical expectations that undermined financial support...