Scott H. Podolsky – författare

In 1935, Richard Cabot (1868-1939), a renowned physician and professor of clinical medicine and social ethics at Harvard University, founded the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study. Appalled by high recidivism rates of reformatories of the day, Cabot wanted to do something to help young, underprivileged boys from engaging in delinquency and embarking on a life of crime. Described as character development through positive role models, with similarities to today's mentoring programs, the prevention intervention enrolled 650 boys (later reduced to 506) from Cambridge and Somerville (Mass.) and operated from 1939-45. Over the next 30 years, three major follow-ups would be undertaken, producing a wealth of knowledge on the development and prevention of offending over the life-course.As the earliest randomized controlled trial in criminology, one of the earliest trials of a social intervention, and the longest running trial in the Western world-with the latest follow-up currently tracing participants well into old age-the CSYS is a famous and consequential study in the annals of criminology. But Cabot was not a criminologist. Instead, he worked at the interface of medicine and the social sciences, bringing to bear his important grounding in social ethics and engaging with leading academicians, including Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck and William Healy. In the years to come, Joan McCord-a leading criminologist in her own right-would take over the study and bring it into the modern era.Drawing on extensive archival materials and published works, Between Medicine and Criminology is the first book about the history of the making of the CSYS, as well as what this history holds for modern criminology. It interrogates and describes in fascinating detail the personal, professional, and institutional influences that led Cabot to develop the study; the social and intellectual contexts during the 1920s and 1930s that helped shape the study's novel and rigorous evaluation design; how the operation of the study and changes from the original design may have contributed to its ineffectiveness in preventing delinquency and later offending; and the impacts-and limitations-of this iconic study in the history of criminology.

In recent decades immunology has been one of the most exciting--and successful--fields of biomedical research. Over the past thirty years immunologists have acquired a detailed understanding of the immune system's unique recognition mechanism and of the cellular and chemical means used to destroy or neutralize invading organisms. This understanding has been formulated in terms of the clonal selection theory, the dominant explanation of immune behavior. That story is the subject of The Generation of Diversity.A major problem for immunologists had long been to determine how cells of the immune system could produce millions of distinct antibodies--and produce them on demand. The clonal selection theory explains that cells with genetic instructions to produce each antibody exist in the body in small numbers until exposure to the right molecule--the antigen--triggers the selective cloning that will reproduce exactly the cell needed. But how can so many different antibody-producing cells be generated from such limited genetic material? The solution to this question came from new applications of molecular biology, and, as the authors argue, the impact of the new techniques changed both the methods and the concepts of immunology.The Generation of Diversity is an intellectual history of the major theoretical problem in immunology and its resolution in the post-World War II period. It will provide for immunologists essential background for understanding the conceptual conflicts occurring in the field today.

Pneumonia-Osler's "Captain of the Men of Death" and still the leading infectious cause of death in the United States-has until now received scant attention from historians. In Pneumonia Before Antibiotics, clinician-historian Scott H. Podolsky uses pneumonia's enduring prevalence and its centrality to the medical profession's therapeutic self-identity to examine the evolution of therapeutics in twentieth-century America. Focusing largely on the treatment of pneumonia in first half of the century with type-specific serotherapy, Podolsky provides insight into the rise and clinical evaluation of therapeutic "specifics," the contested domains of private practice and public health, and-as the treatment of pneumonia made the transition from serotherapy to chemotherapy and antibiotics-the tempo and mode of therapeutic change itself. Type-specific serotherapy, founded on the tenets of applied immunology, justified by controlled clinical trials, and grounded in a novel public ethos, was deemed revolutionary when it emerged to replace supportive therapeutics.With the advent of the even more revolutionary sulfa drugs and antibiotics, pneumonia ceased to be a public health concern and became instead an illness treated in individual patients by individual physicians. Podolsky describes the new therapeutics and the scientists and practitioners who developed and debated them. He finds that, rather than representing a barren era in anticipation of some unknown transformation to come, the first decades of the twentieth-century shaped the use of, and reliance upon, the therapeutic specific throughout the century and beyond. This intriguing study will interest historians of medicine and science, policymakers, and clinicians alike.