“cure-alls” possibly be trusted? The pendulum was swinging, and
companies, to survive, would need research departments, scientists, and
laboratories. In the 1920s, there were a few thousand scientists at drug
companies, but by the 1940s, there were almost sixty thousand, even
before the postwar innovation explosion.^10
The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act was a “landmark in civil
governance, not just for the United States, as it turned out, but for
democratic governments around the world. In the years to come, each
nation of the developed world would adopt its central principles. It was the
first law that required analysis of drugs before they went to market. And it
put into law the notion that the scientific approach—not the commercial,
not the anecdotal, not the approach based on authoritative opinion—would
be the standard for modern society.”^11 That can be said for
pharmaceuticals, but not for implants, for there was no thought of
implants in 1938. It would take decades for the law of the land to
meaningfully modernize the “medical industrial complex.”
The FDA was moved from the Department of Agriculture to the Federal
Security Agency, later named the Department of Health Education and
Welfare (HEW). It now resides within the Department of Health and
Human Services. It has continued to oversee drug manufacturing
(including testing, factory inspections, labeling, marketing, packaging, and
long-term safety analysis); food safety oversight; vaccine, blood, and
serum supervision; and it ensures the safety of cosmetics and products that
emit radiation. The FDA has power of administration over all these areas,
whether they be human or veterinarian. Additionally, the FDA advances
public health by regulating the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution
of tobacco products, and plays a significant role in counterterrorism
capability (by ensuring security of the food supply and fostering the
development of therapeutic medical products.) But it was only in the
1970s that the FDA acquired the power to regulate medical devices.
The definition of a medical device prior to the 1940s never included the
concept of something “implantable.” Hundreds of years ago, devices
tended to be fraudulent or magical, completely lacking in scientific merit:
divining rods, nose straighteners, patent metallic tractors (essentially
magic wands), heated rubber applicators, and unjustifiable knee braces.
Because most of these types of appliances worked (if they did) through the
placebo effect, there was little harm in not condemning them, other than