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Louise Hill Curth (ed.), From Physick to Pharmacology. Five Hundred Years of British Drug Retailing, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. xiii 1 174. 50.00. ISBN 0-7546-3597-X.

This is part of the Ashgate series on the History of Retailing and Consumption which in this instance draws together studies from both medical and business historians. The various essays consider the diverse ways in which the market for pharmaceutical products has developed from apothecaries to prescription drugs and from itinerant sellers to chain stores and pharmacists, thus adding to the understanding of the growth of the British pharmaceutical industry and drug market. The book is laid out in more or less chronological order from the early modern to contemporary era. Patrick Wallis considers the medical market in early modern London and assesses the links between self-treatment and the plying of the apothecaries trade. In a world in which the family was the primary locus of care, there was often only a ne line between the folk medicine of self-care and the nostrums of the apothecary. Both were still based fundamentally on the classical corpus of medical knowledge. Surviving apothecaries bills reveal that while their prices remained beyond the means of the poorest, the medical market opened up to those of middling means through early branded proprietary medicines such as the tonic Daffys mixture. Curths study of medical advertising continues this themxe, and pushes back by a century the birth of the commercial age of the medicinal market from the widely held view of its expansion in the eighteenth century. An interest in health culture provided an impetus to the expansion of proprietary medicines, many of which were the creations of members of the Royal College of Physicians. Steve King links the widening of the market for medicinal drugs to the professionalisation of doctors, their increasing domination of medical knowledge and the distance which they tried to create between their prescribed medicines and the concoctions of the quacks. There was a proliferation of drug-suppliers in the eighteenth century leading to a vibrant and robust sub-regional drugs trade (p. 77). As Hilary Marland highlights, this was then built upon in the nineteenth century with the widening range of complementary therapies including hydrotherapy and homeopathy. The industrial era also marked the emergence of the commercial druggist, much to the concern of the medical profession which felt that their role as guardians of medical knowledge was being usurped. The spread of the commercial druggist was important in bringing the poorest classes into the ambit of the medicinal market, but the real cause of alarm for doctors was that their middle and upper-class patients also resorted to the druggist for cheaper medicines and advice. Stuart Anderson analyses the way in which control over the trade in poisonous substances marked the battleground as the medical profession fought to win back control from the druggist. The ensuing legislation also provided the impetus for the distinction between the professional pharmacist and the commercial druggist. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, the market in non-prescription medicines had widened once more to the shelves of supermarkets and the corner store, leading to as much continuity as change. Judy Slinn charts the struggles within the NHS to pay for the increasing cost of prescription drugs against the ploys of the pharmaceutical companies to promote increased sales and their manipulation of patent regulations when faced with the increasing costs of R&D from 1945. While the phasing of the development of the pharmaceutical market and the establishment of the pharmacist and the druggist is well known, this collections great strength is

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the provision of further detailed regional case studies. Well-written, with excellent references, the volume is let down by a weak and inconsistent index. Overall, though, this is an excellent introduction to the creation of the medicinal market in Britain and hopefully will help spark off a new generation of research into this vital topic in the social history of both business and medicine. Patricia Barton University of Strathclyde
doi: 10.1093/shm/hkm081 Advance Access published 12 November 2007

Scott H. Podolsky, Pneumonia before Antibiotics: Therapeutic Evolution and Evaluation in Twentieth-Century America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. 248. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8018-8327-9.

Physicians and medicinal chemists frequently allude to the period before about 1950 as a pre-scientic era. In their view, doctors had to choose between non-specic toxins and ineffective placebos, clinicians had no formal method to test new therapies and relied instead on subjective measures of patient recovery, and chemists were in the dark about targets for drugs. Only with the advent of penicillin and other broad spectrum antibiotics did a scientic era begin for physicians, clinicians and chemists. Podolsky, in this simultaneously brief and thorough history of pneumococcal vaccination, explodes this myth and also provides a service to historians, sociologists and medical practitioners by describing conicts and compromise betwexen domains of public health and private practice between the 1880s and 1940s. Podolskys book proceeds in three chronological parts, describing rst how therapies for the specic were developed at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. Second, how pneumonia especially was transformed from a disease of individuals to a public health concern in the 1930s; and third, the gradual triumph of antibiotics and antimicrobials after 1939 and the concurrent decline of serotherapy. The book provides an insight into the era in which pneumonia appeared to patients and physicians in the existential guise of Death itself (p. 3). As Podolsky argues, this feature of the disease reveals less about victims and more about methods of combating death. Its high mortality rates and rapid progression meant that unlike tuberculosis, pneumonia did not inspire a rich literature or leave physical reminders (TB sanatoriums) on the landscape. Yet, as Podolsky reveals, a history of the introduction of therapies used to ght pneumococci lls major gaps in other analyses of the clinical trial and of the pre-history to the antibiotic era. While physicians relying on clinical judgement and an n of 1 largely carried the day, the book describes a series of efforts at larger trials, not least those sponsored by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company which sought hard data about new pneumonia treatments introduced during and after the inuenza pandemic of 1918. A promising therapeutic approach when rst introduced, serotherapy as treatment for pneumonia was linked both to the development of bacteriology in the late nineteenth century and its increasing focus on specication of disease types, and also to new institutions such as the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute. My one criticism of this book is that Podolsky intimates links among new organisational forms, emerging institutions and changes in medical science and practices, but does not take the opportunity