I rather enjoy Lawrence Goldstone’s history-of-science mystery/thrillers, of which this is the third and (to date) last; the other two are The Anatomy of Deception (2008) and The Astronomer (2010). Clearly it’s incumbent upon Goldstone to write a few more of them, pronto.
New York, 1899, and young Dr. Noah Whitestone is called to attend upon the dying child of a society household, the boy’s regular physician, the prestigious Dr. Arnold Frias, being otherwise engaged. Just when Noah believes he’s saved his patient, the boy dies. Clearly Frias is eager to blame Whitestone for the death rather than the treatment Frias himself had earlier prescribed, and the older man persuades the family — and society as a whole — to go along with his view. Noah becomes a social leper, abandoned by all but a few friends, as he takes on the medical establishment in his efforts to demonstrate his innocence of the accusation. In the process of this decalumniation he reveals corruption within the pharmaceutical industry . . .
Well, that seems an extremely modern-type theme, doesn’t it! The corruption was very much a real thing, though, and Goldstone’s account of it makes for good reading. For various “freedom” reasons, the regulations concerning medicine in the US were laughably lax during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th (they still are in connection with vitamins and “supplements”): essentially, you could put on the market any quack nostrum you chose, make the wildest promises as to its efficacy, and watch as the authorities sputtered in their powerlessness to do anything to stop you, even as the bodies started piling up. The opportunity was wide open for foreign pharmaceutical companies, such as the German dye-makers Bayer, to use the US population as a huge, unwitting collection of test subjects while at the same time stacking up the profits. US doctors were only too willing to cash in themselves, pocketing hefty inducements to produce wildly overblown encomia as to the drugs’ near-miraculous medicinal properties.
(I’ve written about this era of US medicine in books like Corrupted Science and Denying Science , but there are other, fuller accounts in books focusing specifically on the topic. When I feel a bit better I’ll try to remember to dig out a few relevant titles.)
One of the drugs involved was aspirin, where there was obviously nothing much wrong with the drug itself, though the claims made for it were extravagant. Another was heroin, widely used in children’s cough medicines. It worked, too, for a while . . . until the children developed unaccountable cravings for more cough medicine, and then developed dreadful, sometimes lethal symptoms if those cravings were denied.
Goldstone isn’t the most fluent of fiction writers — I really must tackle some of his nonfiction at some stage — but, for me at least, the fascination of the science history more than compensates for moments of creakiness in the narration, certainly enough that, as will be clear, I’ve become something of a fan.
Noirish 