Control and the Therapeutic Trial. Rhetooric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918-48 (Series: The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine. Clio Medica 82)

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How do doctors decide whether their drugs, or other treatments, actually work? In practice this can be fiendishly difficult. Nowadays the gold standard is the randomised controlled trial (RCT). But the RCT is a recent invention, and the story of how it came to dominate therapeutic evaluation from the latter half of the twentieth century involves acrimony, confrontation, and manipulation of the powerful rhetoric of ‘control’.
Control and the Therapeutic Trial examines the development of the RCT from the eclectic collection of methodologies available to practitioners in the early-twentieth century. In particular, it explores the British Medical Research Council’s (MRC) exploitation of the term ‘controlled’ to help establish its own ‘controlled trials’ as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation, and, ultimately, the MRC itself as the proper authority to adjudicate on therapeutic efficacy. This rhetorical power still clings, and is exploited today.
Control and the Therapeutic Trial will be of interest not only to historians of twentieth-century medicine and practising clinicians who take therapeutic decisions, but to anyone who seeks a broader insight into the forces that shaped, and control, the modern controlled trial.

Martin Edwards is a physician who has practised as a family doctor in London for over twenty years. Throughout this time he has maintained his involvement both in the history of medicine and in clinical research, examining notions of evidence in clinicians’ therapeutic decision-making. He is an honorary research associate at The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.