People
The Placebo Effect:
An Interdisciplinary Exploration
Edited by Anne Harrington
Combining individual essays with a dialogue among writers from fields as far-flung as cultural anthropology and religion, pharmacology and molecular biology, Harvard
historian Anne Harrington expands our ideas about what the placebo effect is and how it has much to teach us about how symbols, settings, and human relationships influence us all. This book highlights and aims at interdisciplinary dialogue ... It will make fascinating reading for clinicians, neurobiologists,
and students, as well as for philosophers and ethicists. More specifically, the book should be considered by those involved in all aspects of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics.
A mere "symbol" of medicine-the sugar pill, saline injection, doctor in a white lab coat-the placebo nonetheless sometimes produces "real" results. Medical science has largely managed its discomfort with this phenomenon by discounting the placebo effect, subtracting it as an impurity
in its data through double-blind tests of new treatments and drugs. This book is committed to a different perspective-namely, that the placebo effect is a "real" entity in its own right, one that has much to teach us about how symbols, settings, and human relationships literally get under our
skin.
Contact
- Email: aharring@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 496-5234
Classes
- HS 171: Narrative and Neurology
- HS 175: Madness and Medicine
- HS 176: Evolution and Human Nature
- HS 177: Stories Under the Skin
- HS 273: Freud and the American Academy
- HS 275: The Minded Body
- HS 278: In Search of Mind
Works
- Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain
- The Placebo Effect
- Reenchanted Science
- The Dalai Lama at MIT
- The Cure Within
