Biomedical subjects
V Berridge
Publications and source records attributed to V Berridge.
History in the public health tool kit.
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Illicit drugs and internationalism: the forgotten dimension. Essay review.
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History in public health: who needs it?
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Opium in 20th-century Britain: pharmacists, regulation and the people.
AIMS: To indicate how the system of pharmaceutical regulation of the sale and use of opium in Great Britain continued throughout the first half of the 20th century. DESIGN: An oral history investigation of community pharmacy in Great Britain (n = 50), together with an analysis of standard pharmaceutical texts. SETTING: Community pharmacies in Great Britain during the 20th century. PARTICIPANTS: Retired community pharmacists with experience of the sale and use of opium during the period. MEASUREMENTS: Oral testimony of retired community pharmacists about the use and sale of opium, and quantitative analysis of numbers of official preparations of opium available during the period. FINDINGS: The popular use of opium continued well after the First World War, and its use as an ingredient of prescribed medicines continued well beyond the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948. CONCLUSIONS: Although the role of pharmacy in the regulation of opiates and other drugs was displaced by medicine following the passage of dangerous drugs legislation in the 1920s, pharmacists continued to play an important part in this regulation, exercising considerable discretion in the process.
Histories of harm reduction: illicit drugs, tobacco, and nicotine.
This paper traces the different historical routes which the public health concept of "harm reduction" has taken for illicit drugs and for tobacco and nicotine. It locates these different recent histories, not just in degrees of dangerousness or risk, but rather in the ways in which those concepts have been mediated through intervening factors. It identifies institutional and cultural/conceptual planes for discussion. Key issues include different routes of medicalization; the role of differing policy communities; changing cultural and class positioning; and the shifting of boundaries between categories of "substance," "drug," and "medicine." [Translations are provided in the International Abstracts Section of this issue.]
Science and policy: historical insights.
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Passive smoking and its pre-history in Britain: policy speaks to science?
This paper analyses the emergence of passive smoking as a 'scientific fact' and its relationship to policy objectives for smoking control in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. It relates this 'discovery' to the emergence and changing objectives of the post-war public health coalition, founded on the concepts of epidemiology. It examines the reciprocal relationship between scientific facts and policy aims, arguing that passive smoking was a 'scientific fact waiting to emerge'. Its conceptual and policy implications embodied the environmental individualism of late twentieth century public health and the alliances with technology and biomedicine within it.
Science and policy: the case of postwar British smoking policy.
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Addiction history.
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Why have attitudes to industry funding of research changed?
This paper discusses the history of the changing relationship between research and industrial funding, using the tobacco industry as its example. It seeks to explain why funding which was once acceptable is now unacceptable. The hypotheses advanced include: the changing nature of the industry's interest in research and the role of marketing; the rise of the 'new public health' alliance focused on abstention rather than on harm minimization; the role of government funding and control of research; and the changing meaning of tobacco and especially nicotine.
AIDS. Crisis, what crisis?
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Drug policy: should the law take a back seat?
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'Special units for common problems': the birth of alcohol treatment units in England.
In 1962 the Ministry of Health issued a memorandum entitled The Hospital Treatment of Alcoholism. The memorandum was the first official statement specifically regarding the treatment of alcoholism within the National Health Service. It marked the end of an era characterized by Ministry of Health rejection of the need to review policies regarding alcohol consumption and alcoholism treatment and the entry of the Ministry into the emerging alcohol arena. This paper uses documentary sources and interview material to examine the events leading up to the memorandum and its recommendation to Regional Health Authorities to establish specialist alcoholism treatment units. The development of such units was not supported by everyone in the alcohol field at that time and the paper discusses the pressures on Department of Health officials which appear to have influenced policy choices. The fact that pressures come from different sources, some advocating different policy options, raises the question: did medical perspectives and evidence for the specialist treatment approach influence policy or did policy makers select the option best fitted to existing Departmental interests?
The need to preserve historical material.
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Researching contemporary history: AIDS.
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Health and medicine in the twentieth century: contemporary history and health policy.
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AIDS, drugs and history.
This paper analyses the relationship of history to two current and inter-related policy issues, AIDS and drugs. AIDS, in particular in its early years, was a disease surrounded by history; and historians and others actively brought the 'lesson of history' into the public debates. Cholera and the Black Death provided historical examples of reactions to past epidemic disease; and the record of voluntarism in Britain in the area of sexually transmitted diseases was used to justify a non-punitive response to AIDS. As the perception of AIDS has changed from epidemic to chronic disease, as reactions to the disease have become 'normalized', so the type of historical input has also altered. The 'lesson of history' approach has appeared less relevant, or has changed focus to encompass chronic--TB, multiple sclerosis--rather than epidemic disease. The concept of AIDS itself as an historic event, of the 'contemporary history' of AIDS has also come to the fore. The paper contrasts the relationship of AIDS and history with the historical reaction to the particular impact of AIDS on drug policy. The policy reaction to illicit drugs has been historically conscious, in particular in the 1960's. But little of this historical perspective filtered into the reaction to AIDS on drug policy. Drugs, unlike AIDS, was not an open policy arena. The paper argues that overall drug policy objectives were already clear and it suited no policy interest to call on the historical record. The achievement of established policy objectives was better achieved by an emphasis on the newness of development, a response to potentially epidemic and unusual circumstances.