Risk,prevention and the breast cancer continuum: The NCI,the FDA,health activism and the pharmaceutical industry

This article examines the contested process through which the drug tamoxifen is being reconstituted as a form of breast cancer risk reduction, healthy women are being reconstituted as risky subjects, and breast cancer is being reconstituted as a continuum. Drawing on medicalization theory but extending it to incorporate the growing significance of risk and the pharmaceutical industry, I argue that an adequate theorization of contemporary processes of medicalization requires that we broaden our focus from patients, physicians and medical systems to the policies, practices, and relationships of the pharmaceutical industry, the medical research community, drug regulatory agencies, and non-governmental organizations involved in health-related activism. In this article I focus on four key sites of controversy and contestation: (1) the clinical trial that tested tamoxifen on healthy women; (2) the supplemental new drug application approval process; (3) the direct-to-consumer marketing campaign; (4) and the counter-campaign organized by women's health groups.     

Voice of Civilisation: advertising and its critics in austerity Britain

The advertising industry was on the defensive during World War Two, with advertising regarded by many British people as deeply unpatriotic, potentially undermining the national interest and the fight against fascism. This article analyses the debate on the role of advertising in Britain in the immediate aftermath of war, when the advertising industry regrouped to meet the challenge of working within an economic environment shaped by the imperatives of a Labour government committed to wide scale state intervention. Critics of advertising within the labour movement were emboldened by this context, and the industry was threatened with punitive taxation in 1947. Focusing particularly on this flashpoint and its aftermath, the article sheds new light on the increasingly open struggle between private enterprise and state planning during this volatile period.