This chapter appears in Trysh Tavis and Timothy AUbry, eds., Re-Thinking Therapeutic Culture (University of Chicago Press), 2015
In this chapter I argue that the experience of suffering was an assumed part of the world in the ... more In this chapter I argue that the experience of suffering was an assumed part of the world in the late eighteenth-century United States, and as a result people did not conceptualize those who suffered as being "damaged" in the way that we do today. Over the course of the nineteen century, the nature of suffering was re-conceptualized as something exterior to the self, and therefore as something that should be ameliorated so that the self could be healed. This re-conceptualization of suffering underlay the rapid growth of therapeutic culture in the twentieth century. Although this has been to the good, I also suggest that we might learn something about how to relate to those who suffer from the past. Sometimes, I argue, keeping people company is the best that we can, and should, do.
Uploads
Books by Joseph Gabriel
Drugs on the Page explores practices of recording, organizing, and transmitting information about medicinal substances by artisans, colonial officials, indigenous peoples, and others who, unlike European pharmacists and physicians, rarely had a recognized role in the production of official texts and medicines. Drawing on examples across various national and imperial contexts, contributors to this volume offer new and valuable insights into the entangled histories of knowledge resulting from interactions and negotiations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans from 1500 to 1850.
Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo17212890.html
Papers by Joseph Gabriel
Hygiene (LSH) in 1917, she was treated by a staff that anticipated the methods of the biopsychosocial
model later developed by Engel. That is to say, the staff members believed that Anna’s rehabilitation
was contingent on a scientific diagnosis of the physical, mental, and social factors that underlay her
condition. However, using Anna and the LSH as a case study, we draw from Latour to show the
limitations of this “modern” method of diagnosis and treatment that persists today. Using Burke, we
advocate for a pragmatic orientation focused on creating rhetorically oriented narratives whose aim is to
help patients make judgments about their health and future, namely, by bringing about the experience
of “form” capable of constituting new types of identification. Effective medical rhetoric thus adopts a
method of persuasion that begins with the narrative and self-understanding of the patient, links aspects
of that narrative with the technical expertise of physicians and other health care providers, and crafts a
new, more specialized narrative attentive to the desires and constraints of a patient’s form of identification
that is ultimately the seat of judgment.
Drugs on the Page explores practices of recording, organizing, and transmitting information about medicinal substances by artisans, colonial officials, indigenous peoples, and others who, unlike European pharmacists and physicians, rarely had a recognized role in the production of official texts and medicines. Drawing on examples across various national and imperial contexts, contributors to this volume offer new and valuable insights into the entangled histories of knowledge resulting from interactions and negotiations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans from 1500 to 1850.
Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo17212890.html
Hygiene (LSH) in 1917, she was treated by a staff that anticipated the methods of the biopsychosocial
model later developed by Engel. That is to say, the staff members believed that Anna’s rehabilitation
was contingent on a scientific diagnosis of the physical, mental, and social factors that underlay her
condition. However, using Anna and the LSH as a case study, we draw from Latour to show the
limitations of this “modern” method of diagnosis and treatment that persists today. Using Burke, we
advocate for a pragmatic orientation focused on creating rhetorically oriented narratives whose aim is to
help patients make judgments about their health and future, namely, by bringing about the experience
of “form” capable of constituting new types of identification. Effective medical rhetoric thus adopts a
method of persuasion that begins with the narrative and self-understanding of the patient, links aspects
of that narrative with the technical expertise of physicians and other health care providers, and crafts a
new, more specialized narrative attentive to the desires and constraints of a patient’s form of identification
that is ultimately the seat of judgment.
Francis E. Stewart to legitimize the commercial introduction of new drugs by reinterpreting the ethical status of patent rights in pharmaceutical manufacturing. I argue that patents had long been understood by the orthodox medical community as an unethical form of medical monopoly and that, as a result, drug companies that marketed their goods primarily to physicians in the years immediately following the Civil War had little room to develop or introduce new products. In collaboration with George S. Davis and the pharmaceutical manufacturing firm Parke, Davis, & Company, Stewart worked to redefine patents as an ethical means of encouraging scientific and commercial innovation. In doing so, he sought to reconcile medical science and commerce so that they were mutually beneficial to one another. However, I also suggest that his efforts had an ironic effect in that they helped legitimatize a form of patent protection that Stewart himself came to believe to be unethical in nature.