Control and the therapeutic trial : rhetoric and experimentation in Britain, 1918-48 / / Martin Edwards.

• Superior document: Wellcome series in the history of medicine
• Author: Edwards, Martin, 1955 Nov. 23-
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Clio Medica 82.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (228 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

How do doctors decide whether their drugs, or other treatments, actually work? In practice this can be fiendishly difficult. Nowadays the gold standard is the randomised controlled trial (RCT). But the RCT is a recent invention, and the story of how it came to dominate therapeutic evaluation from the latter half of the twentieth century involves acrimony, confrontation, and manipulation of the powerful rhetoric of ‘control’. Control and the Therapeutic Trial examines the development of the 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. This rhetorical power still clings, and is exploited today. Control and the Therapeutic Trial will be of interest not only to historians of twentieth-century medicine and practising clinicians who take therapeutic decisions, but to anyone who seeks a broader insight into the forces that shaped, and control, the modern controlled trial.

Table of Contents

Preliminary material / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Acknowledgements / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Note on National Archives Source Material / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Introduction / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- No Word is Innocent: The History and Rhetoric of Controlled Trials prior to 1948 / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Good, Bad or Offal? The Rhetoric of Control in the Evaluation of Raw Pancreas Therapy / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Bright Lights, Smoky Cities: Light Therapy in 1920's Britain / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Control and the MRC’s Evaluation of Serum Therapy for Pneumonia, 1929–34 / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Keeping it Controlled: The MRC’s Trials of Immunisation against Influenza / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Whose Words are they Anyway? The Contrasting Strategies of Almroth Wright and Bradford Hill to Capture the Nomenclature of Controlled Trials / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Conclusion: What’s Controlled about the Controlled Trial? / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Bibliography / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial -- Index / Editors Control and the Therapeutic Trial.