This event is organised by the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease
Abstract: Today, as we increasingly turn our attention to antibiotic resistance and the possibility of a post-antibiotic era, it is important to consider the historical evolution of attempts to implement the “rational” use of antibiotics. In this talk, Scott Podolsky examines seven decades of reformers who have attempted to change how antibiotics are developed, marketed and prescribed. Tensions between antibiotic development and conservation, and between education and regulation, continue to play out today in medical offices, hospitals, industry, agricultural enterprises, and the halls of government alike.
About the Speaker: Scott Podolsky is a Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, and a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. 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), co-edited Oliver Wendell Holmes: Physician and Man of Letters(2009), and most recently authored The Antibiotic Era: Reform, Resistance, and the Pursuit of a Rational Therapeutics (2015).