Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890-1950 - (Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History) by C Gradmann & J Simon

Book Synopsis

Following the testing of therapeutic sera, the quantified evaluation of a pharmaceutical's efficacy became a key feature of medicine in the twentieth century. The case studies in this volume offer comparisons across Europe, from the diphtheria antitoxin in the late 1800s to the introduction of the Salk polio vaccine in the 1950s.

Review Quotes

'...Christoph Gradmann, Jonathan Simon and their co-contributors throw new light on the origins of biomedicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' - Viviane Quirke, Oxford Brookes University, Journal of BJHS

About the Author

CHRISTOPH GRADMANN is Professor in the History of Medicine at the University of Oslo, Norway, since 2006. He took his doctorate as a historian from the University of Hannover in 1992, and has held positions at the University of Heidelberg and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research interests cover the history of infectious diseases in modernity, the history of antibiotic resistance, medical biography and the history of standardisation in twentieth century medicine. His most recent book publication is Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch's Medical Bacteriology.

JONATHAN SIMON teaches history of science at the University of Lyon, France. After receiving a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh he has studied and taught in Berlin, Paris, Sydney and Strasbourg. He has worked and published in both the history of pharmacy and the history of chemistry; most recently he is the co-author (with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent) of Chemistry: The Impure Science.