Generic drugs are familiar objects in clinics, drugstores, and households around the world. We like to think of these tablets, capsules, patches, and ointments as being interchangeable with their brand-name counterparts: why pay more for the same? And yet they are not quite the same. They differ in price, in place of origin, in color, shape, and size, in the dyes, binders, fillers, and coatings used, and in a host of other ways. Claims of generic equivalence, as physician-historian Jeremy Greene reveals, are never based on being identical to the original drug in all respects, but in being the same in all ways that matter.

Decisions about which differences are significant and which are trivial in the world of therapeutics are not resolved by simple chemical or biological assays alone. Questions of therapeutic similarity and difference are also always questions of pharmacology and physiology, of economics and politics, of morality and belief. Generic is the first book to chronicle the social, political, and cultural history of generic drugs in America. It narrates the evolution of the generic drug industry from a set of mid-twentieth-century "schlock houses" and "counterfeiters" into an agile and surprisingly powerful set of multinational corporations in the early twenty-first century.

Greene's history sheds light on the controversies shadowing the success of generics: problems with the generalizability of medical knowledge, the fragile role of science in public policy, and the increasing role of industry, marketing, and consumer logics in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century health care. This edition features a new preface in which Greene explores shortages and price hikes on off-patent drugs, strategies by which old drugs can paradoxically become more expensive, and the role of historical analysis in present-day pharmaceutical policy.

"Greene turns the concept of generic as 'ho-hum' on its head with this jam-packed survey of the effects culture, medicine, and politics have exerted on today's ubiquitous generic drugs for the last 50 years."--Publishers Weekly

"An excellent and recommended history of how the generic drug market came to be."--Library Journal

"Greene should be congratulated for bringing this subject to life--with a mix of anecdote, scholarship, and elegant prose."--Lancet

"A useful framework for understanding how we got to where we are and how we might apply the lessons of the past to the challenges we face today."--Health Affairs

"An excellent example of how to intelligently construct a modern material history, grounded in the logics of the everyday."--Medical Anthropology Quarterly

"Recommended reading for anyone interested in postwar developments in U.S. health care and for scholars and analysts of contemporary pharmaceutical politics."--Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Jeremy A. Greene is a professor of medicine and the history of medicine and the Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease and the coeditor of Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America.

Generic drugs are now familiar objects in clinics, drugstores, and households around the world. We like to think of these tablets, capsules, patches, and ointments as interchangeable with their brand-name counterparts: why pay more for the same? And yet they are not quite the same. They differ in price, in place of origin, in color, shape, and size, in the dyes, binders, fillers, and coatings used, and in a host of other ways. Claims of generic equivalence, as physician-historian Jeremy Greene reveals in this gripping narrative, are never based on being identical to the original drug in all respects, but in being the same in all ways that matter.

How do we know what parts of a pill really matter? Decisions about which differences are significant and which are trivial in the world of therapeutics are not resolved by simple chemical or biological assays alone. As Greene reveals in this fascinating account, questions of therapeutic similarity and difference are also always questions of pharmacology and physiology, of economics and politics, of morality and belief.

Generic is the first book to chronicle the social, political, and cultural history of generic drugs in America. It narrates the evolution of the generic drug industry from a set of mid-twentieth-century "schlock houses" and "counterfeiters" into an agile and surprisingly powerful set of multinational corporations in the early twenty-first century.

The substitution of bioequivalent generic drugs for more expensive brand-name products is a rare success story in a field of failed attempts to deliver equivalent value in health care for a lower price. Greene's history sheds light on the controversies shadowing the success of generics: problems with the generalizability of medical knowledge, the fragile role of science in public policy, and the increasing role of industry, marketing, and consumer logics in late-twentieth-century and early twenty-first century health care.