Book Review: Ten Drugs

Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine by Thomas Hager

This is the kind of book I used to read a lot of in the aughts, pop science about how technology has changed the world. It was a good re-introduction to this subgenre of non-fiction: a layperson’s guide to medical science. It had just enough science to make me feel smart but not so much that I bemoaned my ignorance of organic chemistry. It had enough history to transport me as a listener (I got this as an audiobook) to another world but not so much that I felt like I needed to go to Wikipedia to get my bearings. And the book didn’t feel very prescriptive, which helps because sometimes when an author has an agenda, it reads like a sales brochure.

The book starts out talking about the opium poppy and its derivatives. Much of this I already knew, but there were enough details that I learned a few new things along the way. Later he touches again on this subject with synthetic opioids and the new opioid epidemic. I think you’d have to do some hazy counting to come out with exactly ten drugs discussed in this book, because there were more like forty or fifty. But whatever, it’s a memorable title.

Hagar also discusses the history of inoculation, which was an eye opener to me because I always had been taught that Jenner was the founder of the idea. The reality was closer to “white woman takes inoculation idea from brown women and tries to promote it in her country. Doctors finally spread it, while taking the credit and ruining the simplicity of the process to make it more expensive, less successful, and more dangerous.” Jenner hated the “new” version of inoculation because it got ruined by what passed for medical science in that time and place. He didn’t invent either inoculation or vaccination, he just took what people were already doing and popularized it and got all the credit.

I do feel like Hagar could have spent a little more time on vaccines. Vaccines such as polio, tetanus, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella have had a HUGE affect on populations. Like smallpox, these diseases don’t just kill, they also can cripple and blind people. Considering how much he talks about all the variations of synthetic opioids, a deeper nod to the lifesaving vaccines we all take for granted would go a long way towards educating people about what a blessing it is not not worry that your child would die or be blinded, crippled, deafened, scarred, or rendered sterile when the latest ague came round.

The other thing I disagreed with is that Hagar lumped “the pill” (birth control) in with Viagra. I think this is like lumping WW2 in with that time your uncle got really drunk at a wedding and threw some punches and the cops were called. Both are important, but in terms of how they affect human kind, the scale is nowhere comparable. The pill saves women from being sent off to convents to die when they get impregnated as teens. The pill saves married women from being trapped in poverty by having more children than they can afford to feed. The pill gives a woman a little bit of control over her own body, when for most of human history, pregnancy has been a life-threatening condition more deadly than warfare and with a debilitating decades’ long recovery period. It has drastically altered demographics and empowered women. And what does Viagra do? Helps old men get hard. Without Viagra, old men wouldn’t have orgasms when they had intimate times with a partner. I believe “man can’t orgasm” is a condition far, far less debilitating than, for example, “migraines.” (Funny how “physical intimacy without having an orgasm” is only a serious issue when it’s the man who isn’t enjoying himself.) Putting “hey, women, now you don’t have to keep having babies until you die in childbirth!” in the same category as “Mr. Happy still going places at 65!” kind of grated my feminist sensibilities.

But I don’t discredit him for including it, because part of the point was that big Pharma makes money off of alleviating, but not curing, the diseases and conditions of people who have money. He makes this point with the story of a discovery by two scientists at Cambridge university in the late 20th century which an American company patented and got rich from. Since then the struggle has been how to make money off of creating drugs without pricing them so high that the people who need them can’t get them. Saving lives, it seems, is not as motivating as filthy lucre.

This book was a brief foray into the history of drug manufacture and it’s quite accessible to people without a background in chemistry or medicine. I recommend it for people who don’t read much about the subject. It doesn’t go deeply into any of the subjects it talks about, but it’s a good “gateway” to inspire you to research more.




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