Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America

by Greene, Jeremy A.

• ISBN13: 9781421405063
• ISBN10: 1421405067
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-01
• Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS

Summary

The prescription is much more than the written "script" or a manufactured medicine, professionally dispensed and taken, and worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As an object, it is uniquely illustrative of the complex relations among the producers, providers, and consumers of medicine in modern America. This social history examines America's long love affair with the prescription. The tale of the prescription is one of constant struggles over and changes in medical and therapeutic authority. Stakeholders across the biomedical enterprise have alternately upheld and resisted, supported and critiqued, and subverted and transformed the power of the prescription. Who prescribes? What do they prescribe? How do they decide what to prescribe? These questions set a society-wide agenda that changes with the times and profoundly shifts the medical landscape. Examining drugs individually, as classes, and as part of the social geography of health care, contributors to this volume explore the history of prescribing, including over-the-counter contraceptives, the patient's experience of filling opioid prescriptions, restraints on physician autonomy in prescribing antibiotics, the patient package insert, and other regulatory issues in medicine during postwar America. The first authoritative look at the history of the prescription itself, Prescribed is a groundbreaking book that subtly explores the politics of therapeutic authority and the relations between knowledge and practice in modern medicine.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	p. ix
Introduction: The Prescription in Perspective	p. 1
Goofball Panic: Barbiturates, "Dangerous" and Addictive Drugs, and the Regulation of Medicine in Postwar America	p. 23
Pharmacological Restraints: Antibiotic Prescribing and the Limits of Physician Autonomy	p. 46
"Eroding the Physician's Control of Therapy": The Postwar Politics of the Prescription	p. 66
Deciphering the Prescription: Pharmacists and the Patient Package Insert	p. 91
The Right to Write: Prescription and Nurse Practitioners	p. 117
The Best Prescription for Women's Health: Feminist Approaches to Well-Woman Care	p. 134
"Safer Than Aspirin": The Campaign for Over-the-Counter Oral Contraceptives and Emergency Contraceptive Pills	p. 157
The Prescription as Stigma: Opioid Pain Relievers and the Long Walk to the Pharmacy Counter	p. 184
Busted for Blockbusters: "Scrip Mills," Quaalude, and Prescribing Power in the 1970s	p. 207
The Afterlife of the Prescription: The Sciences of Therapeutic Surveillance	p. 232
Time Line of Federal Regulations and Rulings Related to the Prescription	p. 257
Notes	p. 259
List of Contributors	p. 321
Index	p. 323
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