Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890-1950

C. Gradmann, J. Simon, C. Gradmann, J. Simon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781349300877
  9780230202818
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230285590
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Following the testing of therapeutic sera, the quantified evaluation of a pharmaceutical's efficacy became a key feature of medicine in the twentieth century. The case studies in this volume offer comparisons across Europe, from the diphtheria antitoxin in the late 1800s to the introduction of the Salk polio vaccine in the 1950s.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890–1950
• 1 Paul Ehrlich’s Standardization of Serum: Wertbestimmung and Its Meaning for Twentieth-Century Biomedicine
• 2 Evaluation as a Practical Technique of Administration: The Regulation and Standardization of Diphtheria Serum
• 3 From Diphtheria to Tetanus: The Development of Evaluation Methods for Sera in Imperial Germany
• 4 The Construction of a Culture of Standardization at the Institut Pasteur (1885–1900)
• 5 Quality Control and the Politics of Serum Production in France
• 6 ‘The Geneva serum is excellent!’ Autonomy and Isolation in the Swiss Cantons During the Early Years of Diphtheria Serum: The Case of Geneva
• 7 The State, the Serum Institutes and the League of Nations
• 8 Questions of Quality: The Danish State Serum Institute, Thorvald Madsen and Biological Standardization
• 9 ‘The Wright Way’: The Production and Standardization of Therapeutic Vaccines in Britain, 1902–13
• 10 The Visible Industrialist: Standards and the Manufacture of Sex Hormones
• 11 ‘We need for digitalis preparations what the state has established for serumtherapy …’ From Collecting Plants to International Standardization: The Case of Strophanthin, 1900–38
• 12 Changing Regulations and Risk Assessments: National Responses to the Introduction of Inactivated Polio Vaccine in the UK and West Germany
• 13 Standardization Before Biomedicine: On Early Forms of Regulatory Objectivity
• Index