Robert A. Aronowitz

Aronowitz will write a social history of the ways doctors, patients, and others have decided the effectiveness of medical interventions, such as drugs or surgery. He will analyze a series of therapeutic and preventive case studies from the nineteenth century to the present, including cervical and prostate cancer screening and Lyme disease vaccines, in an effort to connect efficacy judgments made at different levels—in the production of medical knowledge, in clinical practice, and among individual consumers.