Since the 1950s, the American pharmaceutical industry has been heavily criticized for its profit levels, the high cost of prescription drugs, drug safety problems, and more, yet it has, together with the medical profession, staunchly and successfully opposed regulation.Pills, Power, and Policyoffers a lucid history of how the American drug industry and key sectors of the medical profession came to be allies against pharmaceutical reform. It details the political strategies they have used to influence public opinion, shape legislative reform, and define the regulatory environment of prescription drugs. Untangling the complex relationships between drug companies, physicians, and academic researchers, the book provides essential historical context for understanding how corporate interests came to dominate American health care policy after World War II.

About the Author

Dominique A. Tobbell is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Medicine and the Graduate Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is also the oral historian for the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center History Project.

Foreword
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Pharmaceutical Politics, Then and Now

Part I: Forging Pharmaceutical Relations
1. Knowledgeable Relations: The Building of a Pharmaceutical Research Network
2. Workforce Relations: The Invention of the Pharmaceutical Postdoctoral Fellowship
3. Professional Relations: Crafting the Public Image of the Health Care Team

Part II: Allied against Reform
4. Cold War Alliances: Kefauver’s Bid for Pharmaceutical Reform
5. Expert Alliances: The Creation of the Drug Research Board
6. Generic Alliances and the Backlash against Regulatory Reform

Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Learn More

Visit pillspowerandpolicy.com, Dominique Tobbell's website

Reviews

“Based on extensive research, Pills, Power, and Policy is intelligently written, and its points are illustrated with highly readable examples.”
— Health Affairs

“Tobbell contributes . . . fine historical attention to the development of large pharmaceutical companies in the 1940s and 1950s with a longer story of lobbying and politics in the decades that followed.”
— Times Higher Education

“[Tobbell] skillfully demonstrates that the pharmaceutical industry is the ‘Clausewitzian’ continuation of politics by other means. . . . Pills, Power, and Policy is an important contribution to our understanding of the science and politics of the pharmaceutical industry.”
— Inquiry

“Tobbell, in this well-researched and skillfully argued volume, explores how the pharmaceutical industry and its allies in the medical profession forestalled still more aggressive reform in the second half of the twentieth century, setting the stage for the ongoing debate and reform efforts of the twenty-first century. . . . It is the particular strength of Tobbell’s fine book to draw attention to such historical details—and their consequences.”
— Bulletin Of The History Of Medicine

"A compact, highly readable volume that is accessible to multiple audiences."
— Journal of American History

"A thoughtful, well researched, and refreshingly well-written study. . . . Anyone interested in how health policy has been shaped will profit from this most enjoyable book."
— Journal of the History of Medicine

"A strong case for the proposition that the history of pharmaceutical regulation in the USA is essential for an understanding of contemporary policy debates in America."
— Social History of Medicine

"Tobbell analyzes the political and economic history of the alignment of the pharmaceutical industry, academic institutions and their faculty and organized medicine. This book is essential reading for policymakers and their staff as well as persons who study the history of health policy and those who contribute to it through medical research, advocacy and journalism. " -Daniel Fox, author of The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States

"Dominique Tobbell’s vivid, balanced and probing account of pharmaceutical politics is a significant, needed analysis of the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry, university researchers, the medical profession and government in the Cold War period. More than this, Pills, Power, and Policy shows why it continues to be difficult to agree in the United States on the relative roles of corporate enterprise, government regulation, technological innovation, freedom to prescribe, and consumer marketing and protection, all played out against the rising costs of health care. Timely and thought-provoking."--Rosemary A. Stevens. DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College

"A superb and compelling account of the creation of one of America’s most reviled entities: Big Pharma. With clarity and subtlety, Pills, Power, and Policy weaves together the political, economic, and the medical to reveal the entangled history behind our modern pharmaceutical predicament."--Andrea Tone, Ph.D., Professor of History & Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine, McGill University

“Pills, Power and Policy provides an outstanding description and analysis of the evolution of drug policy. It is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the political, scientific, and economic nature of pharmaceutical regulation." -Daniel S. Greenberg, Washington journalist and author of Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

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