Description
Book SynopsisControl and the Therapeutic Trial examines the development of the randomised controlled trial (RCT) from the eclectic collection of methodologies available to practitioners in the early-twentieth century. In particular, it explores the British Medical Research Council’s (MRC) exploitation of the term ‘controlled’ to help establish its own ‘controlled trials’ as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation, and, ultimately, the MRC itself as the proper authority to adjudicate on therapeutic efficacy.
Trade Review"a fascinating conclusion…" – in: SciTech Book News, June 2008 "…the book is indeed an impressive attempt… Control and the Therapeutic Trial successfully questions the solemn rigidity of a contemporary scientific truth…. The book is a welcome addition to the scholarship dealing with social constructions of truths. The content, along with the easy style of writing, should ideally attract readers of diverse interest: historians of medicine and science, practising physicians as also non-specialist readers." – in: Wellcome History 41 (2009), 20-21 "In this excellent book Martin Edwards demonstrates that words with histories are never innocent… Edwards provides a historically rich dissection of how the controlled trial became the preferred tool to produce knowledge that could direct practice… This book fills a gap in our understanding of what has been called the therapeutic revolution." – in: Metascience 18 (2009), 437–441 "Edwards…. does illustrate a fundamental shift of sense over the three decades covered by this study… Edwards draws on a generation of scholarship, including several well-known but unpublished dissertations." – in: Medical History, 54 (2010), 421–422
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Note on National Archives Source Material Introduction 1 No Word is Innocent: The History and Rhetoric of Controlled Trials prior to 1948 2 Good, Bad or Offal? The Rhetoric of Control in the Evaluation of Raw Pancreas Therapy 3 Bright Lights, Smoky Cities: Light Therapy in 1920s Britain 4 Control and the MRC’s Evaluation of Serum Therapy for Pneumonia, 1929–34 5 Keeping it Controlled: The MRC’s Trials of Immunisation against Influenza 6 Whose Words are they Anyway? The Contrasting Strategies of Almroth Wright and Bradford Hill to Capture the Nomenclature of Controlled Trials 7 Conclusion: What’s Controlled about the Controlled Trial? Bibliography Index
