All Drug History is Divided into Three Parts

Walter Sneader. Drug Discovery: A History New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. xi + 468 pp. $65.

Reviewed By Leo B. Slater

Aristotle, beta-blockers, cephalosporin, Domagk . . . From A to Z, if it’s about drugs or their inventors, you’ll find it in here. Somewhere between a textbook and an encyclopedia, Walter Sneader’s Drug Discovery: A History is an ambitious book, attempting to pack the history of medicinal substances from Neanderthals to today into 450 pages crammed with chemical structures and printed in a miniscule font. Some readers may be familiar with Sneader’s earlier book, Drug Discovery: The Evolution of Modern Medicines (Wiley, 1985). The two books share many similarities, but History is much expanded, reorganized, and updated with a depth of detail far beyond that of the older book.

Like Julius Caesar’s Gaul, Sneader’s history is divided into three parts. These are in turn divided into sections for a total of more than 30 chapters. Sneader employs several themes to contain his vast sweep of time. Part 1, “Legacy of the Past,” takes us from prehistory to the systematic medicine of the 18th and 19th centuries, with a coda on surgical anesthesia that protrudes into the 1950s. Parts 2(“Drugs from Naturally Occurring Prototypes”) and 3 (“Synthetic Drugs”), which make up the bulk of the book, deal with 19th- and 20th-century discoveries, though the real meat of Sneader’s story remains the mid-20th century—the 1920s to the 1970s. These parts depart from a purely chronological organization to classify drugs by their origins, either literally (e.g., whether they were isolated from plants or animals) or intellectually, (e.g., whether a compound was produced by chemical analogy or serendipity). This mixture is not as distracting as one might expect; with so many small stories to tell, Sneader’s thematic organization does offer coherence to an otherwise unruly collection of facts. He has done a fine job of making a vast array of information accessible.

Sneader’s book is intended for both the specialist and the general reader, but I would more strongly recommend it to the scientifically trained reader who is interested in history. Indeed, the scientific articles that fill the footnotes point to this readership. Once Sneader engages with the modern era, virtually all his notes are to the primary, technical literature. This is one of the book’s strengths and an improvement over the sometimes frustrating bibliography-based references of Sneader’s earlier book. (Though it gained better notes, this work lost its predecessor’s bibliography.) The notes reference few historical works, particularly for the modern period, but provide a fine guide to the primary literature, much of which has not yet been electronically indexed. Most readers will wish to read around inside the book, taking advantage of its copious index and cross referencing, rather than read it from cover to cover. This is a fine reference book and a good bit of fun for those interested in the names, dates, and facts of pharmaceutical history. Those with more of an interest in the process of drug development should consider CHF’s fine edited collection, Pharmaceutical Innovation: Revolutionizing Human Health (1999).