Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book,and along with it my own double life as a physician-historian,would not have been possible without the support of many individuals. There is not enough space here to properly acknowledge the many acts of generosity that have helped to eventually bring this work to publication. First I must thank my principal dissertation adviser,Allan M.Brandt,who introduced me to the powerful analytic possibility that history offers to the study of disease, medicine, and society; encouraged my dual life by his own example; and represented all that I could ask for in a mentor. I had the outrageous good fortune to include Charles E. Rosenberg and Arthur Kleinman as co-advisers for my dissertation, and this book owes a great deal to both of them: to Arthur for helping me to engage in the interdisciplinary play between history and ethnography that is involved when one writes about the very recent past, and to Charles for being an exceptionally insightful and close reader, whose iterative commentary on my evolving work has helped me to become a better writer as well as a better historian. Various parts of this text have benefited from close readings and conversations with Bridie Andrews, Robbie Aronowitz, Conevery Bolton-Valencius, Dan Carter, Jennifer Clark, Chris Crenner, Arthur Daemmrich, Joseph Dumit, Chris Feudtner, Jennifer Fishman, Nathan Greenslit, Katja Guenther, Orit Halpern, David Healy, Bill Helfand, Greg Higby, David S. Jones, Powell Kazanjian , Nick King, Andrew Lakoff, Ilana Lowy, Harry Marks, Mara Mills, Greg Mitman, Amber Mussa, Todd Olszeuski, Nicholas Rasmussen, Barbara Rosenkrantz , Hanna Shell, Grace Shen, John Swann, Jason Szabo, Carsten Timmermann , Nancy Tomes, Andrea Tone, Keith Wailoo, Elizabeth Watkins, and Nicholas Weiss. Particularly effusive thanks must go to Debby Levine, Abena Osseo-Asare, Scott Podolsky, Alisha Rankin, and Elly Truitt for their extensive and repetitive engagement with the manuscript as a whole. The work has also benefited from scholarly presentation and discussion in several venues, including the meetings of the American Association for the History of Medicine and the Society for the Social Study of Science, and colloquia at Kansas University Medical Center, McGill University, the History of Science Department at Harvard University, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and the New York Academy of Medicine. Any mistakes that remain in the present work are, of course, my own fault. Many people made it easier for me to integrate the research for this book with my medical training. At Harvard’s History of Science Department I am particularly indebted to Jude LaJoie. At the medical school I had the good fortune to gain the guidance and support of Claudia Galeas, Cavin Hennig, Orah Platt, and William Taylor of the Castle Society; Leon Eisenberg, Paul Farmer, Byron Good, Jim Kim, Helena Martins, and Christine Moreira of the Department of Social Medicine; Nancy Andrews, Linda Burnley, David Golan, Alan Michelson, and Christopher Walsh in the MD/PhD Program; and Gerard Coste, David Hirsch, and Barbara Ogur of the Cambridge Health Alliance. Financial support for earlier versions of this work was provided by the History of Science Department,the Merit and John Parker Scholarships from the Graduate Student Council,the Whiting Foundation for the Humanities,the Charles Warren Center forAmerican History,theAmericanAssociation for the History of Pharmacy, and a MSTP Grant from the National Institutes of Health. I would also like to thank the faculty of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital for creating an environment where a medical intern could be actively encouraged to keep up as a historian, and the rest of the residents at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital—particularly the others in my cohort of interns—for their support while the manuscript was making its way to press. Public and private archivists gave invaluable assistance to the research for xiv Acknowledgments this project, and many individuals also granted me extensive interviews. I would like to thank in particular John Huck, Eugene Kuryloski, William Helfand , Edward Freis, Susan Freis, Edward Roccella, James Cleeman, and Mickey Smith, who provided oral histories and made available items from their own personal collections. Jeff Sturchio, Joe Ciccone, and Doreen Strang provided access to the Merck Archives. Other notable guides include Susan Speaker at the National Library of Medicine, John Swann and Susan White Junod at the Food and DrugAdministration,Gregory Higby and Elaine Stroud at theAmerican Institute of the History of Pharmacy, Chris Warren at the New York Academy of Medicine...