Another look at pharmaceuticals

Over the past 40 years, beginning with the seminal work of medical sociologists like Erving Zola and Peter Conrad, thousands of studies have contributed to describing and analyzing medicalization. What is common to most of these studies is that pharmaceutical drugs are almost always involved in the process described. Since medications and their omnipresence in current societies have inspired many empirical and theoretical analyses, some authors are now proposing the concept of pharmaceuticalization rather than medicalization to describe the widespread use of pharmaceuticals  (Williams et al., 2011; Abraham, 2010).

The complex assemblage surrounding drugs, from the pharmaceutical industry to the construction of technoscientific identities, from biotechnologies to clinical practices, makes us wonder about the epistemological dimension of drugs as social objects and about the ways humanities and social sciences (sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy) have conceptualized and analyzed it since the last 30 years.

In order to examine these and related conceptual and methodological issues in greater detail, we have examined a set of articles addressing pharmaceuticals published in humanities and social sciences databases (Sociological Abstracts, Proquest, Abstracts in Anthropology, Historical abstracts, etc.).  About 300 articles were analyzed. A classification of the articles based on Guba and Lincoln’s epistemic paradigms (positivist, post-positivist, constructivist, critic (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011)) helped to define the ontological contours of pharmaceuticals as objects. In a global era, interesting avenues point to how technologies and pharmaceuticals contribute to the counting of lives saved (international health programs and pharmaceutical industry initiatives) and the numbering of biological processes (hypertension, cholesterol levels, etc…) as well as to the reconfiguration of social space and time.