Jeremy Greene
On November 14, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz receives Jeremy Greene, M.D., Ph.D., from the Institute of the History of Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) to take part in the Thursday Meeting (Encontro às Quintas). These meetings are the main academic events organized by the Graduate Program in the History of Science and Health at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, part of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), the largest biomedical research institution in Latin America.
In his presentation, Dr. Greene will reassess the first versions of the “therapeutic revolution” narrative, widely described as a change in the efficacy of pharmacotherapy in the twentieth century, which has been a key topic in the history of medicine for the last four decades.
He notes that if anyone was asked what differences there were between medical practice in 2013 and 1913, they would probably tell stories about how few effective medicines we had then, and how we now have more powerful drugs to fight diseases. These narratives suggest subtle and dramatic shifts in society in the wake of the discovery of a number of magical formulas in the last century. In this version of history, medications are what made medicine modern. Dr. Greene seeks to understand to what extent this modernist narrative is actually based on a painstaking reexamination of historical materials. Can we say that a therapeutic revolution (or many therapeutic revolutions) has taken place? If so, when, where and for whom?
In his analysis of “therapeutic revolution” narratives, he draws on contemporary critics, especially Thomas McKeown in his 1968 book, The Role of Medicine. In it, the British physician and demographer argues that the terms of the therapeutic revolution have been overplayed by describing the decline in mortality by infectious diseases in England and Wales from the early 1800s to the 1960s.
With a PhD in the history of science from Harvard University, Greene presently works as a medical practitioner at East Baltimore Medical Center and the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. He is author of Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease and co-editor of Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing Prescriptions in Modern America.
Thursday Meetings
Date: November 14, 2013
Time: 10 am
Venue: Fiocruz Manguinhos Campus, room 407, Prédio Expansão building (Avenida Brasil, 4,036, Rio de Janeiro)
