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Previous Volume 345:226-227 July 19, 2001 Number 3 Next

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By Trent Stephens and Rock Brynner. 228 pp. Cambridge, Mass., Perseus, 2001. $26. ISBN 0-7382-0404-8.

Some drugs have become household names — penicillin, insulin, aspirin. Most are known — indeed, revered — as lifesavers. Thalidomide, too, falls into the category of well-known drugs, but for an entirely different reason. As a medicine that maimed rather than saved, it had atrocious effects on the unborn child that make it an object of terror and horror.

Thalidomide appeared in the late 1950s — a decade of optimism about therapies, fueled largely by the success of penicillin during the Second World War. Postwar Western society was essentially at peace with the great infectious diseases, thanks to vaccines and . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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