STS Circle at Harvard
[cid:[email protected]]
Scott Podolsky
Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital

on

Antimicrobials and Public Health: From Serotherapy to Antibiotics (and Back)

Monday, October 6
12:15-2:00 pm
Room 100F, Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street

[cid:[email protected]]

Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP via our 
online<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HbdY3j1fVcUeE-UqQ7pN5clAxQtaQX7Ux6Y0tRMM9E8/viewform>
 
form<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HbdY3j1fVcUeE-UqQ7pN5clAxQtaQX7Ux6Y0tRMM9E8/viewform>
 before Thursday morning, October 2nd.

Abstract: Today, from Ebola to MRSA, we live in a global arena focused from the 
one end on the equitable distribution of available antimicrobials, and from the 
other on the dangers of antimicrobial overprescribing and overconsumption.  
Such concerns represent two sides of an aspiration to a "rational" 
therapeutics, in which the right drugs for the right patients are available at 
the right time in the right place for the right cost.  These are longstanding 
concerns, and this talk will trace the course of antimicrobial policy in the 
United States over the course of the past century, from the advent of the 
treatment of pneumonia with antiserum in the first decades of the twentieth 
century, through the advent of antibiotics and evolving concerns over 
irrational therapy and antibiotic resistance in recent decades.  Alternative 
futures - whether utopian or dystopian - have been envisioned, and alternative 
regulatory policies have been chosen to promote or alter such futures, 
throughout the past century.  In the process, the roles of patients, private 
practitioners, public health departments, industry, regulatory bodies, and 
independent national and international organizations have been reimagined in 
the ongoing struggle to implement a rational therapeutics.

Biography:  Scott Podolsky is an Associate Professor of Global Health and 
Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a primary care physician at 
Massachusetts General Hospital.  Since 2006, he has served as the Director of 
the Center for the History of Medicine based at the Countway Medical Library. 
He has co-authored Generation of Diversity: Clonal Selection Theory and the 
Rise of Molecular Immunology (1997), authored Pneumonia before Antibiotics: 
Therapeutic Evolution and Evaluation in Twentieth-Century America (2006), and 
co-edited Oliver Wendell Holmes: Physician and Man of Letters (2009). His 
forthcoming book, The Antibiotic Era: Reform, Resistance, and the Pursuit of a 
Rational Therapeutics, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 
January of 2015.


A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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