Abstract
Most existing scholarship on pharmaceutical regulation has focused on legal, political, economic, and organizational dimensions of the regulatory process.* Relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between the regulation of drug products and the epidemiology and definition of the disease categories to which they are necessarily linked. As drugs have increasingly come to define diseases, and diseases to define drugs, the regulatory nexus connecting the two has served to make the informational economy of pharmaceutical risks and benefits increasingly crucial to the decisions and health practices that doctors and patients make on a daily basis. Over the late twentieth century, pharmaceutical policy because a key contested terrain in the regulation of medical practice and medical markets. In this chapter I will present a case study that succinctly illustrates some of the successes, failures, and lingering tensions surrounding these efforts.
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© 2013 Jeremy A. Greene
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Greene, J.A. (2013). Regulating Drugs, Regulating Diseases: Consumerism and the US Tolbutamide Controversy. In: Gaudillière, JP., Hess, V. (eds) Ways of Regulating Drugs in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291523_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291523_6
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