Interview with Toine Pieters

Abstract

This is the third interview in the journal’s new “Conversations” section. Drawn from my broader project Interviews with Researchers from the Anthropology, History, and Sociology of Pharmaceuticals: Mapping Out the Area, the following discussion features Professor Toine Pieters. From his early years of lab work in the Netherlands, to his move into social sciences and history, Pieters followed a path that stretched from studying molecules to analyzing their historicization. In the course of our discussion, he adopted a didactic approach, while not losing any analytical profundity, and he addressed several topics that will certainly interest drugs studies scholars. The conversation covers such subjects as the forgotten pasts of certain pharmaceuticals; the social appeal and promises embedded in “wonder drugs”; the agency of therapeutic drugs; the co-construction of drugs, diseases, and their handlers; the social interaction between doctors and patients; and the role of promise, hope, faith, and fashion in medicine and, particularly, in pharmaceuticals.