Children, Drug Therapy, and Pharmaceuticals in the United States, 1906-1979

FAIN: FA-231944-16

Cynthia Anne Connolly
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)

A book-length history of the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children.

This historical study traces the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children. This project’s central argument is that a history of children and drugs is an important lens through which to study children’s place in American life. It spotlights the ways in which evolving constructions of health and disease, shifting child-rearing notions, and changing beliefs about children, have helped medicalize childhood. It is the first book length history of this topic, joining a body of scholarship that attends to age as a historical variable. It is especially important to study this issue historically because almost every twentieth century drug law was enacted because of a pediatric disaster. But drug safety improved for adults, not children, and remains a vexing problem. Most research into this phenomenon is ahistorical. This project is also significant because it shows the novel insights that can be gained by the use of a humanities framework to study scientific and ethical issues.

Associated Products

Children and Drug Safety: Balancing Risk and Protection in Twentieth-Century America (Book)
Title: Children and Drug Safety: Balancing Risk and Protection in Twentieth-Century America
Author: Cynthia A. Connolly
Abstract: "Children and Drug Safety" traces the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children in the twentieth century, a history that sits at the interface of the state, business, health care providers, parents, and children. This book illuminates the historical dimension of a clinical and policy issue with great contemporary significance. Each chapter of the book engages with major turning points in pediatric drug development; themes of children's risk, rights, protection and the evolving context of childhood; child-rearing; and family life in ways freighted with nuances of race, class, and gender.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780813563879
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

Arthur J. Viseltear Award for book in the history of public health
Date: 11/13/2018
Organization: American Public Health Association
Abstract: The Arthur J. Viseltear Award is given each year by the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association to a historian who has made outstanding contributions to the history of public health, either through a body of scholarship or through a recent book (published within the previous two years). This year the selection committee has chosen to honor Children and Drug Safety: Balancing Risk and Protection in Twentieth Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2018) for its outstanding and deeply insightful historical research and original contribution to science policy. Its focus on the politics of pediatric drug safety and the making of invasive drug markets and consumers the committee members felt, addresses a critical gap in public health histories of childhood and contributes to ongoing debates in the US on prescriptions and the role of experts.

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