#  Scott Podolsky 

Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, HMS

Director, Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A Countway Library, HMS

 

 

 



   ![Scott Podolsky is holding the 1959 issue of the Saturday Review.](/sites/g/files/omnuum11411/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2026-05/76.Scott-Podolsky-Questions.jpg?h=16f098c7&itok=vPHZSI1i) 

 



 





 

Historians of medicine open up discussions regarding who gets sick and why, how we structure medical practice, research, and educations, and the important relationships between medicine and the society in which it is embedded. Our goal is to examine our past so as to better understand how we can behave in the present and, at times, how we might do things differently moving forward.

Our Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway is one of the largest and most important medical history collections in the world, comprised of rare books, medical journals, the Warren Anatomical Museum, the archives of Harvard's schools in medicine, public health, and dentistry, and the personal papers of over 1000 individuals, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Mary Ellen Avery.

My own favorite collection at the Center is the nearly 40 cubic feet of correspondence, writings, and research - all carefully organized - of Maxwell Finland, arguably the most respected and influential clinical investigator of antimicrobials throughout the twentieth century. Finland, by the mid-1950s, was incensed by - and outspoken regarding - what he saw as understudies yet over-marketed and over-prescribed antibiotics, with correlated adverse effects, excessive costs, superinfections, and increasingly antibiotic resistance.

In 1969, the Saturday Review brought Finland's concerns forward to a national audience through its scathing articles, "Taking the Miracle Out of the Miracle Drugs." The article not only played a role in widening the scope of congressional hearings that led to the passage of the Kefauver-Harris Amendments (mandating FDA proof of drug efficacy via "well-controlled" investigations prior to new drug approval), but anticipated many of today's concerns regarding seemingly irrational antibiotic use.

Finland's personal papers, as well as the Saturday Review article, are both inspiring as models of mobilizing attention to critical medical issues, but sobering in revealing the limits of prior reform efforts and the depths of the tasks that remain before us today.



 

 

 



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