Dr. Scott Poldosky Promoted

Scott Podolsky, MD, has been promoted to Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine

Scott Podolsky, MD, has been promoted to Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine. Dr. Podolsky is recognized for his investigations on the history of therapeutics and the changing meanings of "rational Therapeutics." His work has imprortant implications for how we understand issues ranging from the proper use of antibiotics to the conduct of randomized controlled trials, the nature of continuing medical education, and the fundamental idea of medical rationality.

Among his noted contributions:

Pneumonia before Antibiotics: Therapeutic Evolution and Evaluation in Twentieth-Century America (2006), which used the history of the treatment of pneumonia with antipneumococcal antiserum in the first half of the twentieth century as a window into the advent and application of the therapeutic “specific” in America, as well as the changing nature of therapeutic evaluation over the course of this half-century.

The Antibiotic Era: Reform, Resistance, and the Pursuit of a Rational Therapeutics (2015), which traced the history of nearly seven decades of antibiotic reform efforts, from those that have focused on the FDA as a site of reform, to those that have focused on the broader structures of care delivery and the impact of such structures on both the implementation of a rational therapeutics and, perhaps more often, the development of antibiotic resistance.

For his explorations of the relationship between pharmaceutical promotion and physician education, cited in the 2009 IOM report, Conflicts of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice, Scott and co-author Dr. Jeremy Greene (now at Hopkins) earned the 2011 J. Worth Estes Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

As director of the Countway Center for the History of Medicine, Scott and the late deputy director, Kathryn Hammond Baker, revitalized the center as a vehicle for enabling the history of medicine to inform contemporary medicine and society.

We are delighted with and proud of Dr. Podolsky's success and look forward to continuing to benefit from his collegiality as well as his scholarship in the history of medicine. Congratulations to Professor Podolsky!