Control and the Therapeutic Trial

Martin Edwards is a physician who has practised as a family doctor in London for over twenty years. Throughout this time he has maintained his involvement both in the history of medicine and in clinical research, examining notions of evidence in clinicians’ therapeutic decision-making. He is an honorary research associate at The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

• AcknowledgementsNote on National Archives Source MaterialIntroduction1 No Word is Innocent: The History and Rhetoric of Controlled Trials prior to 19482 Good, Bad or Offal? The Rhetoric of Control in the Evaluation of Raw Pancreas Therapy3 Bright Lights, Smoky Cities: Light Therapy in 1920s Britain4 Control and the MRC’s Evaluation of Serum Therapy for Pneumonia, 1929–345 Keeping it Controlled: The MRC’s Trials of Immunisation against Influenza6 Whose Words are they Anyway? The Contrasting Strategies of Almroth Wright and Bradford Hill to Capture the Nomenclature of Controlled Trials7 Conclusion: What’s Controlled about the Controlled Trial?BibliographyIndex

"a fascinating conclusion…"– in: SciTech Book News, June 2008"…the book is indeed an impressive attempt… Control and the Therapeutic Trial successfully questions the solemn rigidity of a contemporary scientific truth…. The book is a welcome addition to the scholarship dealing with social constructions of truths. The content, along with the easy style of writing, should ideally attract readers of diverse interest: historians of medicine and science, practising physicians as also non-specialist readers."– in: Wellcome History 41 (2009), 20-21"In this excellent book Martin Edwards demonstrates that words with histories are never innocent… Edwards provides a historically rich dissection of how the controlled trial became the preferred tool to produce knowledge that could direct practice… This book fills a gap in our understanding of what has been called the therapeutic revolution."– in: Metascience 18 (2009), 437–441"Edwards…. does illustrate a fundamental shift of sense over the three decades covered by this study… Edwards draws on a generation of scholarship, including several well-known but unpublished dissertations."– in: Medical History, 54 (2010), 421–422