The Corner Society "Who's in Whose Pocket? Reference Tools, Industry Interests, and the Quest for Therapeutic Reform"

Andrew Lea, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics, University of Rochester

Who's in Whose Pocket? Reference Tools, Industry Interests, and the Quest for Therapeutic Reform

Physicians have carried practical guides for centuries. These tools—variously called “manuals,” “handbooks,” “pocket remembrancers,” or more commonly, “vade mecums” (Latin for “go with me”)—served as on-the-go memory stimuli. Nineteenth-century manuals, such as Robert Hooper’s The Physician’s Vade-Mecum sought to “compress” for the busy physician the vast expanse of descriptive medical knowledge into a useful companion. This act of compression resulted in a knowledge bottleneck: with such limited space, including certain kinds of information invariably came at the expense of other types of information. The vade mecum would therefore become a contested site over what counted as “appropriate,” “important,” and “rational” medical knowledge. This lecture explores these themes by focusing on the American Medical Association’s Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry (CPC), which, in the early 1930s, created a vade mecum to counter the excesses of proprietary drug manufacturers and inculcate a rational approach to medical therapeutics.

Andrew Lea is an assistant professor of health humanities and bioethics at the University of Rochester and a general internist at the Strong Memorial Hospital. His research explores the history of artificial intelligence, communications media, and information technology in medicine and has appeared in leading historical and medical journals, including Isis and the New England Journal of Medicine. His first book, Digitizing Diagnosis, examined early efforts to computerize medical diagnosis and decision-making. He is working on his second book, Aid to Thought: A History of the Peripheral Brain in Medicine, which looks at the broader history of reference tools in medicine, from the Index Medicus to AI.