Joseph Gabriel
About
Joseph M. Gabriel is a historian of science, technology, and medicine. He also writes about bioethics and contemporary issues in medicine. His primary appointment is in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine, where he teaches medical history, clinical interviewing skills, and related topics. He also holds an appointment in the Department of History, where he teaches courses in the history of medicine, United States history, and the history of drugs.
Dr. Gabriel received his Ph.D. in 2006 from Rutgers University. He held a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in the Science Studies program at the University of California, San Diego. He also taught at the University of Wisconsin, where he held the George Urdang Endowed Chair in the History of Pharmacy. He was the first person to hold an endowed chair in that field in the country and the first scholar in the humanities to achieve tenure in the College of Medicine at FSU. He is the recipient of the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Award.
Dr. Gabriel has authored or co-authored more than thirty books, articles, book chapters, and legal briefs on the history of pharmaceuticals, clinical drug trials, academic medical science, and related topics. He is also interested in the history of public health, the history of addiction, legal history, narrative theory, and the history of ethics. He is the author of Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2014), co-author of Electronics: The Lifestory of a Technology (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and co-editor of Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World. His most recent book, co-edited with David Herzberg and Nils Kessel, is Risk/Benefit: History from the Border Between Licit and Illicit Drugs (University of Rochester Press, forthcoming)
Recent publications
Joseph M. Gabriel, “Ehrlich’s Dangerous Magic: Salvarsan, Innovation, and Narrative” in Nils Kessel, Joseph M. Gabriel, and David Herzberg, eds., Risk/Benefit: History from the Medicine and Drug Divide. Forthcoming.
Joseph M. Gabriel, “Thick Concepts and Pharmaceutical Industry Corruption” in Joel Faintuch (Sao Paulo University) and Salomao Faintuch (Harvard Medical School), eds., Business Ethics in the Healthcare Industry. Springer. 2026
Jessica Day, Joseph M. Gabriel, Austin Spitz, Jeffrey Harman, “Racial Disparities in Pain Medication Prescribed for Injury during Emergency Department Visits.” Journal of Emergency Medicine. 2025.
Joseph M. Gabriel and Sukumar P. Desai, “’The Warmth of His Continuing Interest’: Henry K. Beecher, the Bioethics Revolution, and Pharmaceutical Industry Funding of Academic Medical Science in Cold War America” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 78:2 (2023), 191-2008
Joseph M. Gabriel and Bennett Holman, “Clinical Trials and the Origins of Pharmaceutical Fraud: Parke, Davis & Company, Virtue Epistemology, and the History of the Fundamental Antagonism,” History of Science 58:4 (2020), 533-558.
Christopher McKnight Nichols, Nancy Bristow, E. Thomas Ewing, Joseph M. Gabriel, Benjamin C. Montoya, Elizabeth Outka, “Conceptualizing and Teaching the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic in the Age of COVID-19,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19:4 (2020), 642-672.
Joseph M. Gabriel, “Jacob Stegenga’s Medical Nihilism: Historical Scholarship and the Question of Efficacy” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 81 (2020).
Joseph M. Gabriel, “Indian Secrets, Indian Cures, and the Early History of the United States Pharmacopoeia” in Crawford, M. and Gabriel, J.M., eds., Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 240-262.
Joseph M. Gabriel, “Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime” in Temenuga Trifonova, ed., Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (Routledge, 2017), 236-251.
Joseph M. Gabriel, “Pharmaceutical Patenting and the Transformation of American Medical Ethics” British Journal of the History of Science 49:4 (2016), 577-600.
Nathan Crick and Joseph M. Gabriel, “Medical Narrative and the Rhetoric of Identification: The Many Faces of Anna White Dildane,” Health Communication 31:11 (2016), 1318-132
