During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike
considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug
manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly; physicians who prescribed
patented drugs could be, and were, ostracized from the medical
community. In the decades following the Civil War, however, complex
changes in patent and trademark law intersected with the changing
sensibilities of both physicians and pharmacists to make intellectual
property rights in drug manufacturing scientifically and ethically
legitimate. By World War I, patented and trademarked drugs had become
essential to the practice of good medicine, aiding in the rise of the
American pharmaceutical industry and forever altering the course of
medicine.
Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical
Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a
sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often
troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical
practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of
patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century
pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical
ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in
pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not
only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property
scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the
pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and
the role of advertising in the marketplace.
