The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader

The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader is an engaging survey of the field that brings together provocative, multi-disciplinary scholarship examining the interplay of medical science, clinical practice, consumerism, and the healthcare marketplace.

• Draws on anthropological, historical, and sociological approaches to explore the social life of pharmaceuticals with special emphasis on their production, circulation, and consumption
• Covers topics such as the role of drugs in shaping taxonomies of disease, the evolution of prescribing habits, ethical dimensions of pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, and drug research and marketing in the age of globalization
• Offers a compelling, contextually-rich treatment of the topic that exposes readers to a variety of approaches, ideas, and frameworks
• Provides an accessible introduction for readers with no previous background in this area

Sergio Sismondo is Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Queen's University, Canada. His current work, including a number of recent articles, explores the pharmaceutical industry's development and deployment of clinical research, focusing on intersections of marketing and science. He is the author and co-author of a number of books, including An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2010) and The Art of Science (2003). He is Editor of the journal Social Studies of Science.

Jeremy A. Greene is Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His recent work focuses on the ways in which the development and consumption of therapeutics interact with our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal. His broader research interests focus on the history of disease, the history of global health, and the history of the pharmaceutical industry and its interactions with medical research, clinical practice, and public health.  He is the author of Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicines (2014) and Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (2007), as well as co-editor of Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America (2012).