MEDICINE AND COLONIAL PATENT LAW IN INDIA: A Study of Patent Medicines and the Indian Patents and Designs Act, 1911 in Early- Twentieth-Century India.

This paper investigates the history of drugs sold as "patent medicines" in India in the early twentieth century. The paper investigates their legitimacy as patenting of medicines was forbidden by the Indian Patents and Designs Act, 1911 (IPDA). The paper argues that the instrument of letters patents functioning as the prerogative of the Crown that gave monopolistic rights to grantees to sell any compound without having to disclose its constituents was the reason behind this seemingly conflicting historical relationship between the law and the market. Colonial law-making left sufficient space within the ambit of the IPDA for letters patents to have their ill effects. The colonial state made attempts to address this as a public health issue by incorporating concerns related to this class of medicines within regulations addressed to the drugs market in the 1930s. The currency of patent medicines in the market was further added to by Indian indigenous entrepreneurs fueled by cultural nationalism of Swadeshi ideology in Bengal in the early twentieth century. However, even such indigenous responses or attempts at hybridization of manufacturing and selling practices related to patent medicines were mostly informed by upper-caste/ upper-class interests and not so much by those of consumers of these medicines.

American Civil War medical practice, the post-bellum opium crisis and modern comparisons.

The American Civil War resulted in massive numbers of injured and ill soldiers. Throughout the conflict, medical doctors relied on opium to treat these conditions, giving rise to claims that the injudicious use of the narcotic caused America's post-bellum opium crisis. Similar claims of medical misuse of opioids are now made as America confronts the modern narcotic crisis. A more nuanced thesis based on a broader base of Civil War era research suggests a more complex set of interacting factors that collectively contributed to America's post-war opium crisis.

Clinical trials and the origins of pharmaceutical fraud: Parke, Davis & Company, virtue epistemology, and the history of the fundamental antagonism.

This paper describes one possible origin point for fraudulent behavior within the American pharmaceutical industry. We argue that during the late nineteenth century therapeutic reformers sought to promote both laboratory science and increasingly systematized forms of clinical experiment as a new basis for therapeutic knowledge. This process was intertwined with a transformation in the ethical framework in which medical science took place, one in which monopoly status was replaced by clinical utility as the primary arbiter of pharmaceutical legitimacy. This new framework fundamentally altered the set of epistemic virtues-a phrase we draw from the philosophical field of virtue epistemology-considered necessary to conduct reliable scientific inquiry regarding drugs. In doing so, it also made possible new forms of fraud in which newly emergent epistemic virtues were violated. To make this argument, we focus on the efforts of Francis E. Stewart and George S. Davis of Parke, Davis & Company. Therapeutic reformers within the pharmaceutical industry, such as Stewart and Davis, were an important part of the broader normative and epistemic transformation we describe in that they sought to promote laboratory science and systematized clinical trials toward the twin goals of improving pharmaceutical science and promoting their own commercial interests. Yet, as we suggest, Parke, Davis & Company also serves as an example of a company that violated the very norms that Stewart and Davis helped introduce. We thus seek to describe one possible origin point for the widespread fraudulent practices that now characterize the pharmaceutical industry. We also seek to describe an origin point for why we conceptualize such practices as fraudulent in the first place.

The empowered patient on a historical-rhetorical model: 19th-century patent-medicine ads and the 21st-century health subject.

The contemporary health subject, often described as a new, empowered patient, is not simply a character in a story of progress toward knowledge and power, away from credulity and passivity. Before the 20th century, and the assertion of a medical system that became frankly paternalistic, laypeople adjudicated on many matters of illness and its treatments. That is, 18th- and 19th-century health subjects were empowered too, and studying them, especially as consumers of health products, helps us develop a more nuanced account of our current medico-commercial selves. Comparing historical advertisements for "patent medicines" and contemporary direct-to-consumer ads for prescription pharmaceuticals, this essay contributes to such an account. It identifies strategies that drug marketers have deployed over centuries to persuade consumers to buy their products, and it tracks a rhetoric of interpellation in advertisements that not only address but also constitute health subjects. The goal of the analysis is to increase alertness to our own susceptibilities to pharmaceutical ads and adjacent rhetorics of health and illness.

Swanson's Five Drops.

If one is searching for a perfect example of why the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was needed, this 1901 SWANSON'S RHEUMATIC CURE CO. foldover brochure would fit the bill (Figures 1A, 1B, and 1C). The SWANSON "FIVE DROP" REMEDIES were heralded as "the faithful guardian and sentinel of the human system" that "stands at the door and challenges every germ that knocks for admittance." FIVE DROPS had an "unfailing effect in the following diseases Rheumatism in all its forms, Sciatica, Backache, Neuralgia, Nervousness, Sleeplessness, Nervous and Neuralgic Headaches, Nervous Dyspepsia, and Nervous affections of every description, Asthma, Hay Fever, Croup and Bronchitis, Catarrh, Heart Weakness, Toothache (authors' emphasis), Earache, La Grippe, Malaria, Creeping Numbness and kindred diseases." What couldn't these drops cure? A bottle of Swanson's Five Drops is pictured in Figures 2A and 2B.

Perry Davis' Pain Killer: America's First Nationally Advertised Drug for Analgesia?

Perry Davis' Pain Killer, a combination of opium, alcohol, and other substances, was formulated in 1839 and marketed successfully worldwide within 4 decades as both an internal and external pain remedy.

Authority and ownership: the growth and wilting of medicine patenting in Georgian England.

Secret, owned, Georgian medicines were normally known as patent medicines, though few had a current patent. Up to 1830, just 117 medicines had been patented, whilst over 1,300 were listed for taxation as 'patent medicines'. What were the benefits of patenting? Did medicine patenting affect consumer perception, and how was this used as a marketing tool? What were the boundaries of medical patenting? Patents for therapeutic preparations provided an apparent government guarantee on the source and composition of widely available products, while the patenting of medical devices seems to have been used to grant a temporary monopoly for the inventor's benefit.

["Holtos," a Patented Medicine of the Late Edo Era--Wrapping Style, Statement of Medicine Efficacy, and Tablet Form].

Holtos is a medicine that was patented by Kan-sei-do, a pharmacy in Osaka, and sold as a Western medicine from the late Edo era to the Meiji era. It is similar to the patented medicine Uluus, which sold well using the katakana brand name. This article introduces HOLTOS products marketed beginning in the late Edo era and makes a comparative study with Uluus products. The features of Holtos include more indications of what the drug can be used to treat in order to emphasize its versatility. There was also a slight increase in size of the tablet sold at the same price as Uluus, and other improvements such as embossing the name "Holtos" on the surface of the tablet. These reasons lead to the conclusion that Holtos was a patented medicine that imitated Uluus. Furthermore, it has been confirmed that strategic measures were taken by Holtos to outlast competition in the market.

What's in a name? Generics and the persistence of the pharmaceutical brand in American medicine.

This paper explores the complex role that brand names have played in the maintenance of therapeutic standards within twentieth-century American medicine. What made a generic drug generic in the second half of the twentieth century--and by extension, what made a nonproprietary drug not proprietary in the first half--was dependent on changing drug branding practices and evolving standards of evidence attached to claims of therapeutic efficacy and safety. This article maps three eras of shifting oppositions between branded and unbranded pharmaceuticals. First, an era of "ethical marketing," extending from before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 into roughly the 1930s, which pitted nonproprietary or "ethical" pharmaceuticals against proprietary or patent medicines; second, an era of ascendant brand-name prescribing from the 1930s until roughly the 1960s, as manufacturers of innovative and patent-protected "specialty" drugs depicted generic production as a form of counterfeiting; and finally, an era of generic backlash from the 1960s onwards, which assumed the interchangeability of branded and generic drugs. This article uses clinical, popular, policy, and trade literatures to explore the enduring roles of brand-logic in the face of generic competition in the American drug market.

[The admirable effects of panaceas: ideas between antiquity and early modern times]. / Die wunderbaren Wirkungen von Allheilmitteln: Vorstellungen zwischen Antike und Früher Neuzeit.

Panaceas, i. e. medicines that can cure many or almost all diseases, were used throughout the history from antiquity until modern times. The paper focuses on ideas developed to explain the admirable actions of these medicines. In antiquity such actions seem to be related to the large number of ingredients as well as to the presence of materials connected to potent poisons (e. g. viper flesh). Later, with the advent of alchemy, the alchemical preparation is regarded to produce medicines with such properties, the most pregnant example being lapis philosophorum. Such explanations are underpinned by the correspondences with higher astral influences as espoused by Paracelsus, as well as by van Helmont's idea that both disease and cure depend exclusively on the state of the 'spirit of life'. At the same time Galenic-like ideas survive, in the sense that panaceas are something like universal purifiers. Besides curing diseases panaceas were used to ensure long living, permanent health as well as for achieving rejuvenation. In this respect, they show an affinity to the so-called 'healing power of nature'.

A cup full of domesticity: the "Duke-Fingard" vaporizer.

This article presents the history of the "Duke-Fingard" domestic medical vaporizer. It considers the emergence of this Canadian device out of Rudolph Duke and David Fingard's larger institutional inhalation treatment system, and seeks to trace and explain the medical, social, commercial and cultural influences that shaped its subsequent sale, use of electricity, and design. What emerges through this synchronic and microhistorical analysis is a more concrete sense of the practice of domestic medicine during a transformative period of Canadian medical history.