Lecture: "They Used to Call it 'Just Nerves': Pills, Science, and Profit in Modern Medicine" by Andrea Tone (New York Academy of Medicine, 7 April 2004)
Lecture: "They Used to Call it 'Just Nerves': Pills, Science, and Profit in Modern Medicine" by Andrea Tone (New York Academy of Medicine, 7 April 2004) Forwarded to HISTNEUR-L from H-SCI-MED-TECH. --RJ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Suzanne Moon , H-SCI-MED-TECH" [smtedit@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU] Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 5:47 am From: Chris Warren [cwarren@NYAM.ORG] Subject: Lecture at NYAM: Andrea Tone on "Pills, Science, and Profit in Modern Medicine" As part of its 2003-2004 series of free public lectures, The New York Academy of Medicine's Section on Historical Medicine is hosting a three-part mini-series on the recent history of psychiatry in the United States. The final lecture in this mini-series will be on Wednesday, April 7: Andrea Tone, Ph.D. "They Used to Call it 'Just Nerves': Pills, Science, and Profit in Modern Medicine" Lecture 6:00 PM, Reception 5:30 PM New York Academy of Medicine 1216 Fifth Ave., New York In this talk, Andrea Tone considers the complex modern history of the pharmaceutical industry as well as the doctors who prescribed and the patientswho took the new miracle drugs that began appearing in the mid- 1950s. Within a decade Miltown and its benzodiazepine successors (particularly Librium and Valium) had become household words, and by 1972 Valium had become the most frequently prescribed drug in the United States and the world. A majority of prescribers were not psychiatrists but general practitioners, internists, gynecologists, surgeons, and pediatricians. The unprecedented success of tranquilizers raises unsettling questions about the role of psychopharmacology in clinical practice, the specter of middle-class and suburban drug abuse, and the elusive threshold separating everyday nerves from pathological anxiety -- questions that continue to haunt modern psychiatry. Andrea Tone is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of History, Technology, and Society at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of _Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America_, and _The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America_. These events are free and open to the public. For more information about NYAM programs in the history of medicine, write history@nyam.org or call Christian Warren at 212.822.7314. --- Founded in 1847, the New York Academy of Medicine is a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the health of the public through research, education and advocacy, with a particular focus on disadvantaged urban populations. Please visit our website: http://www.nyam.org .