HOULTON, Maine — Cary Library will host the streamed lecture and discussion “Maximum Prescriptions: Growing Health and Happiness through facts and pharmaceuticals” from 5:30-7:30 p.m. on Monday Oct. 28.
Cary Library will offer pre- and post-lecture discussion around the lecture, focusing on Joseph Dumit’s book, “Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health.”
How can health be considered a market to be grown, and are there limits to it? This presentation examines some of the forces driving research in health, especially the turn toward risk reduction, mass prevention, and life-long chronic treatments. By looking at how the pharmaceutical industry struggles with defining health, it shows how market size comes to play a critical role in our changing understanding of public health and the continual growth of pharmaceutical consumption.
The facilitator will be Glenn Hines. He will lead a short discussion before the lecture. Afterwards, there will be a time to discuss questions and observations.
Dumit is director of science and technology studies and professor of anthropology at the University of California Davis. He was associate editor of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry for 10 years. He is a founding member of the Humanities Innovation Lab (http://modlab .ucdavis.edu) and is currently studying how immersive 3D visualization platforms are transforming science (http://keckcaves.org). He has begun work on a new project on the history of flow charts, cognitive science, and paranoid computers.
