Christoph Gradmann and Jonathan Simon (eds). Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890-1950, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. xiv + 266. pound 55,00. ISBN 978 0 230 20281 8.

摘要

Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, new kinds of therapeutic agents began to enter medical practice. In contrast to traditional medicines, which were mainly plant extracts or inorganic substances, the newer agents, including antibacterial sera, therapeutic vaccines and hormones, were largely derived from living organisms. Since the exact chemical composition of these 'biologicals' was frequently unknown, determination of potency and, in clinical use, dosage, depended in the first instance not on measurement of quantities of chemical constituents, but on the creation of quantifiable physiological tests. The development and standardisation of these tests, and their embedding in practices and institutions, which came to be referred to by the German term Wertbestimmung (determination- oivalue), are the subjects of this volume. In their introduction the editors rightly point out that the history of Wertbestimmung may be understood as part of a wider movement of standardisation in science, technology and industry in the decades around 1900, with connections to changes in the financing of health care, and to the public health movement, in Western countries. More directly pertinent to the papers collected here is their insistence that Wertbestimmung in relation to biologicals was a complex process in which the methods of standardisation could take different and independent forms, and in the development of which researchers, industrialists, clinicians and health administrators all played distinguishable but interacting roles.