Jeremy Greene, M.D., Ph.D.

Associate Professor,
Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine

Institute of the History of Medicine
The Johns Hopkins University
1900 East Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21205

Phone: 410-955-4899
E-mail: greene@jhmi.edu

History of therapeutics, especially the pharmaceutical industry; history of medicine and global health; history of disease.

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in the history of therapeutics—especially pharmaceuticals—and my research explores the ways in which our cures and remedies come to influence our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal.

I am currently working on a history of generic drugs.  Generic drugs are never fully identical to the brand name products they imitate.  Rather, their claims to being ‘the same’ lies in proof that they are similar enough in ways that matter to be functionally interchangeable. As the market for generic substitutes has grown--from only 10% of the American pharmaceutical market in 1960 to nearly 80% by 2010--so too have epistemological and epidemiological conflicts over how one can prove that generics are truly equivalent to their brand-name counterparts.   These conflicts over generic drugs reveal fundamental conflicts over what it means to practice rational medicine, and what role consumers, physicians, insurers, and others should have in defining that rationality.

My broader research interests focus on the history of disease, the history of global health, and the relationship between medicine and the marketplace. I received my MD and PhD in the history of science from Harvard in 2005, completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in 2008, and am board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians. In addition to my appointment at the Institute for the History of Medicine, I also practice internal medicine at the East Baltimore Medical Center with admitting privileges to the Johns Hopkins University Hospital.

Recent Publications

Books

Greene JA and Watkins, ES. (eds.) Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing Prescriptions in Modern America. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, in press, anticipated April 2012.

Greene JA. Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Articles

Jones DS, Podolsky SH, Greene JA.  The burden of disease and the changing task of medicine.  New England Journal of Medicine 2012; 366(25):233-8.

Greene JA. What’s in a name?  Generics and the persistence of the pharmaceutical brand in American medicine. Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 2011; 66(4): 425-467.

Greene JA and Kesselheim AS.  Why do the same drugs look different?  Pills, trade dress, and public health. The New England Journal of Medicine 2011; 365(1):83-89.

Greene JA. Making medicines essential: the evolving role of pharmaceuticals in global health. BioSocieties 2011; 6:10-33.

Greene JA and Podolsky SH. Keeping modern in medicine: pharmaceutical promotion and physician education in postwar America. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2009; 83: 331-377.

Chapters

Greene JA. “The Afterlife of the Prescription: Sciences of Therapeutic Surveillance” in Greene, Jeremy A. and Watkins, Elizabeth S. (eds.) Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing Prescriptions in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

Greene JA. “Regulating Drugs, Regulating Disease: Diabetes, Consumerism, and the Tolbutamide Crisis, 1969-1984” in Jean-Paul Gaudilliere and Volker Hess (eds.), Making Drugs: Ways of Regulating in Factories, Laboratories, and Consulting Rooms. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: 122-136.

Daemmrich A and Greene JA.  “From Visible Harm to Relative Risk: Overcoming Fragmented Pharmacovigilance,” in Elhage, E. (ed.), The Fragmentation of U.S. Health Care: Causes and Solutions.  Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. 301-323.

Greene JA. “The Abnormal and the Pathological: Cholesterol, Statins, and the Threshold of Disease” in Andrea Tone and Elizabeth Watkins (eds.), Medicating Modern America: Pharmaceutical Drugs in History. New York: New York University Press, 2007; 183-228.

Courses

History of Medicine, from the 18th century to the present (spring)