Drug-related morbidity and mortality is rampant in contemporary industrial society, despite or perhaps because, government has assumed a critical role in the process by which drugs are developed and approved. Parrish asserts that, as a people, Americans need to understand how it is that government became the arbiter of pharmaceutical fact. The consequences of our failure to understand, he argues, may threaten individual choice and forestall the development of responsible therapeutics. Moreover, if current standards and control continues unabated, the next therapeutic reformation might well make possible the sanctioned commercial exploitation of patients. In Defining Drugs, Parrish argues that the federal government became arbiter of pharmaceutical fact because the professions of pharmacy and medicine, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, could enforce these definitions and standards only through police powers reserved to government. Parrish begins his provocative study by examining the development of the social system for regulating drug therapy in the United States. He reviews the standards that were negotiated, and the tensions of the period between Progressivism and the New Deal that gave cultural context and historical meaning to drug use in American society. Parrish describes issues related to the development of narcotics policy through education and legislation facilitated by James Beal and Edward Kremers, and documents the federal government's evolving role as arbiter of market tensions between pharmaceutical producers, government officials, and private citizens in professional groups, illustrating the influence of government in writing enforceable standards for pharmaceutical therapies. He shows how the expansion of political rights for practitioners and producers has shifted responsibility for therapeutic consequences from individual practitioners and patients to government. This timely and controversial volume is written for the scholar and the compassionate practitioner alike, and a general public concerned with pharmacy regulation in a free society.

This biography of James Edmund Reeves, whose legislative accomplishments cemented American physicians' control of the medical marketplace, illuminates landmarks of American health care: the troubled introduction of clinical epidemiology and development of botanic medicine and homeopathy, the Civil War's stimulation of sanitary science and hospital medicine, the rise of government involvement, the revolution in laboratory medicine, and the explosive growth of phony cures. It recounts the human side of medicine as well, including the management of untreatable diseases and the complex politics of medical practice and professional organizing. Reeves' life provides a reminder that while politics, economics, and science drive the societal trajectory of modern health care, moral decisions often determine its path.

"Old English Patent Medicines in America" examines the use and influence of English patent medicines in America during the 18th and 19th centuries, shedding light on their cultural and economic significance.

This volume demonstrates how humans adapt to new and challenging environments by building and adjusting their identities. By gathering a diverse set of case studies that draw on popular themes in contemporary historical archaeology and current trends in archaeological method and theory, it shows the many ways identity formation can be seen in the material world that humans create. The essays focus on situations across the globe where humans have experienced dissonance in the form of colonization, migration, conflict, marginalization, and other cultural encounters. Featuring a wide time span that reaches to the ancient past, examples include Roman soldiers in Britain, Vikings in Iceland and the Orkney Islands, sex workers in French colonial Algeria, Irish immigrants to the United States, an African American community in nineteenth-century New York City, and the Taino people of contemporary Puerto Rico. These studies draw on a variety of data, from excavated artifacts to landscape and architecture to archival materials. In their analyses, contributors explore multiple aspects of identity such as class, gender, race, and ethnicity, showing how these factors intersect for many of the individuals and groups studied. The questions of identity formation explored in this volume are critical to understanding the world today as humans continue to grapple with the legacies of colonialism and the realities of globalized and divided societies.