Description: In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio, using 55,000 healthy children. The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many prominent health professionals, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it forward. He shows that at a time when most Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing, and at times, deception.
Review Quotes: "Drawing on oral history interviews, medical journals, newspapers, meeting minutes, and private institutional records, Mawdsley reveals the intertwined social, political, ideological, and institutional actors involved in the construction of public consent for experimental medical research in the Cold War era... Mawdsley's presentation of the untold case study of GG trials in the 1950s is an important contribution to scholarship focused on the sociological and political constructions of public consent and scientific success."-- "Canadian Bulletin of Medical History"