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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.
The tale of the prescription is one of constant struggles over and changes in medical and therapeutic authority. 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.
The first authoritative look at the history of the prescription itself, Prescribed is a groundbreaking book that subtly explores the politics of therapeutic authority and the relations between knowledge and practice in modern medicine.
Review Quotes
1.
"Prescribed" provides the reader with a much better understanding of how we have gotten to our current system of managing, and mismanaging, prescription drugs in the United States.--Scott D. Grimwood "Watermark "
2.
This book provides a good overview of the major problems relating to prescriptions and detailed coverage of particular matters for those who want to investigate them further.--Nano Khilnani "Biz India Magazine "
3.
This collection may do for the history of epistemology of pharmaceuticals and ideas about drugs what Rosenberg and Golden's "Framing Disease" did for the history and epistemology of disease.--Dan Malleck "Social History of Medicine "
4.
The volume is an exceptional collection of stories, which not only reveals the history of the prescription in modern America, but also adds a significant layer to our broader knowledge of pharmaceutical and medical history.--Mat Savelli "Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences "
5.
The emerging field of pharmaceutical history is well served by "Prescribed," an excellent book that examines postwar American pharmacy and medicine by focusing on the act of prescribing.--Gregory Higby "Journal of American History "
6.
Prescribed provides the reader with a much better understanding of how we have gotten to our current system of managing, and mismanaging, prescription drugs in the United States.
--Scott D. Grimwood "Watermark "
7.
This book provides a good overview of the major problems relating to prescriptions and detailed coverage of particular matters for those who want to investigate them further.
--Nano Khilnani "Biz India Magazine "
8.
The emerging field of pharmaceutical history is well served by Prescribed, an excellent book that examines postwar American pharmacy and medicine by focusing on the act of prescribing.
--Gregory Higby "Journal of American History "
9.
This collection may do for the history of epistemology of pharmaceuticals and ideas about drugs what Rosenberg and Golden's Framing Disease did for the history and epistemology of disease.
--Dan Malleck "Social History of Medicine "
10.
The volume is an exceptional collection of stories, which not only reveals the history of the prescription in modern America, but also adds a significant layer to our broader knowledge of pharmaceutical and medical history.
--Mat Savelli "Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences "
