Medical Monopoly - Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry - Grand Format

During much 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. Yet in the decades following the Civil War, intellectual property rights were reinterpreted as an important and ethical component of the scientific development of new drugs, driven in part by complex changes in patent and trademark law, by the rise of modern laboratory and clinical science, and by reformers' efforts to improve the safety of the drug market.
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 overlooked 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 efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. Medical Monopoly is essential reading for anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.