Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease

This is, I believe, one of the best, and most significant, books published recently on the development of medical practice and the pharmaceutical industry in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. Its importance arises from the issues and questions it addresses; its quality from the way in which it tackles them. It is a scholarly and groundbreaking study, reflecting the author's expertise as both a historian of medicine and an active medical practitioner, a relatively rare combination of knowledge and skills. The ‘modern predicament of the subjectively healthy but highly medicated individual’ (p. viii) which is the subject of the study is discussed in a solely American context, but it is by no means a purely US phenomenon. The medical practice which results in the prescription of such drugs is widespread in Europe too, particularly in the UK, and the pharmaceutical corporations which supply the drugs are active players in world markets.