Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890-1950

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction: Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890–1950

   • Christoph Gradmann, Jonathan Simon

   Pages 1-12

3. Paul Ehrlich’s Standardization of Serum: Wertbestimmung and Its Meaning for Twentieth-Century Biomedicine

   • Cay-Rüdiger Prüll

   Pages 13-30

4. Evaluation as a Practical Technique of Administration: The Regulation and Standardization of Diphtheria Serum

   • Axel C. Hüntelmann

   Pages 31-51

5. From Diphtheria to Tetanus: The Development of Evaluation Methods for Sera in Imperial Germany

   • Anne I. Hardy

   Pages 52-70

6. The Construction of a Culture of Standardization at the Institut Pasteur (1885–1900)

   • Gabriel Gachelin

   Pages 71-88

7. Quality Control and the Politics of Serum Production in France

   • Jonathan Simon

   Pages 89-104

8. ‘The Geneva serum is excellent!’ Autonomy and Isolation in the Swiss Cantons During the Early Years of Diphtheria Serum: The Case of Geneva

   • Mariama Kaba

   Pages 105-117

9. The State, the Serum Institutes and the League of Nations

   • Pauline M. H. Mazumdar

   Pages 118-138

10. Questions of Quality: The Danish State Serum Institute, Thorvald Madsen and Biological Standardization

    • Anne Hardy

    Pages 139-152

11. ‘The Wright Way’: The Production and Standardization of Therapeutic Vaccines in Britain, 1902–13

    • Michael Worboys

    Pages 153-173

12. The Visible Industrialist: Standards and the Manufacture of Sex Hormones

    • Jean-Paul Gaudillière

    Pages 174-201

13. ‘We need for digitalis preparations what the state has established for serumtherapy …’ From Collecting Plants to International Standardization: The Case of Strophanthin, 1900–38

    • Christian Bonah

    Pages 202-228

14. Changing Regulations and Risk Assessments: National Responses to the Introduction of Inactivated Polio Vaccine in the UK and West Germany

    • Ulrike Lindner

    Pages 229-251

15. Standardization Before Biomedicine: On Early Forms of Regulatory Objectivity

    • Alberto Cambrosio

    Pages 252-261

16. Back Matter

    Pages 262-266

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Following the testing of therapeutic sera, the quantified evaluation of a pharmaceutical's efficacy became a key feature of medicine in the twentieth century. The case studies in this volume offer comparisons across Europe, from the diphtheria antitoxin in the late 1800s to the introduction of the Salk polio vaccine in the 1950s.

• 20. Jahrhundert
• 20th century
• biomedicine
• Britain
• Europe
• France
• Germany
• nation

'...Christoph Gradmann, Jonathan Simon and their co-contributors throw new light on the origins of biomedicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' - Viviane Quirke, Oxford Brookes University, Journal of BJHS

• University of Oslo, Norway

  Christoph Gradmann

• Université de Lyon, France

  Jonathan Simon

CHRISTOPH GRADMANN is Professor in the History of Medicine at the University of Oslo, Norway, since 2006. He took his doctorate as a historian from the University of Hannover in 1992, and has held positions at the University of Heidelberg and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research interests cover the history of infectious diseases in modernity, the history of antibiotic resistance, medical biography and the history of standardisation in twentieth century medicine. His most recent book publication is Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch's Medical Bacteriology.

JONATHAN SIMON teaches history of science at the University of Lyon, France. After receiving a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh he has studied and taught in Berlin, Paris, Sydney and Strasbourg. He has worked and published in both the history of pharmacy and the history of chemistry; most recently he is the co-author (with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent) of Chemistry: The Impure Science.

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