| | You still need to be careful...
I started reading this and while in the main it is very much as you might expect and comfortably challenging in bringing lots of ideas together there are potential philosophical problems. Is it true that science merely replaced religion -- and I do not mean supplanted and certainly not defeated but only became the new justification for western imperialism?
On a more particular note... Gaukroger mentioned the discoveries of penicillin and cortisone. He said that neither of them actually came from a specific programme to find them. True perhaps but cortisone's history is different from that of penicillin.
Again, I am enjoying the book. It is a good read, but you need to keep your wits about you.
One of the early threads is Gaukroger's preference for clinical medicine versus research. Research has done little except turn people into guinea pigs for torture, he said.
It is unfair to pick on the ugly stepsister, of course. However, following the idea of cortisone, I found this:
In the United States a black market developed which had serious medical and social repercussions. Patients who had experienced great relief of their symptoms were not prepared to relapse when supplies ran out. They became totally dependent on the drug. Overdosage led to devastating side effects, and the ever escalating cost of maintaining their supplies resulted all too often in financial destitution. Such patients had no alternative but to seek relief by registering as guinea pigs to research groups such as the one at the Bellevue Hospital in New York which I joined in 1952.
Eventually, in 1954, under the joint aegis of the Nuffield Foundation and the Medical Research Council, a British trial was organised in six centres in which the benefits of cortisone were studied in 61 patients with rheumatoid arthritis in a crossover trial against aspirin. The published results startlingly concluded that there was no significant difference between the two groups (BMJ 1954;i:1223-7).
Philip Hench was deeply offended by these conclusions especially as they were signed by many colleagues whom he had numbered among his greatest friends. Indeed he was heard to refer to some of the signatories as traitors and he refused any further association with them.
I felt that the crossover nature of the trial and some of the methods of evaluation gave rise to an unrealistic conclusion and I imprudently wrote a letter (BMJ 1954;i: 1376). My letter drew an angry reply from Sir Austin Bradford-Hill, the distinguished medical statistician who had designed the trial protocol (BMJ 1954;i:1437). I met him many years later and he graciously agreed that some of my comments were justified in the light of subsequent events.
-- http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/317/7161/822/a
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