Global pharmaceuticals : ethics, markets, practices /

Petryna (anthropology, The New Sch.), Andrew Lakoff (sociology & science studies, Univ. of California, San Diego), and Arthur Kleinman (medical anthropology & psychiatry, Harvard) have edited a collection of nine essays that grew out of the 2002 W.H.R. Rivers Distinguished Lectures in Social Medicine at Harvard University. Most of the writers are medical anthropologists, and their subjects deal with various aspects of "the human consequences of pharmaceutical use and their market expansions in cross-cultural and everyday contexts." Essays offer the results of original research as they discuss the global search for human research subjects, the creation of markets to match existing drugs, company/practitioner ties in Argentina, narcotic dependency treatment in France, how the poor access healthcare in urban India, and government policy in providing AIDS antiretroviral treatment in Brazil and Uganda. The editors hope to spur further research into the issues raised, and although their anthology offers a broader view than found in Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies, with its clearly academic style, it is not aimed at the same general readership. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.-Dick Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.