Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2016
Chemical developments during the past one hundred years have filled domestic medicine cabinets as well as pharmacies. The widespread availability of medications has clearly transformed life and living in the twentieth century, with the healing benefits of antibiotics and chemotherapy countered by the destructive effects of addictive drugs both old and new. Even those medications prescribed and supervised by physicians are but one of hundreds of factors which may influence human behavior, decision making, and even international affairs. Half-way through this century even a relatively harmless drug was the scapegoat in an American book, The Aspirin Age (Leighton, 1949), whose contributors reviewed the “utterly fantastic news events of the gaudy and chaotic years that separated Versailles and Pearl Harbor.”