Research at the Intersection of Media and Medicine, 1957–1962

This chapter explores cross-fertilization between researchers and media figures in the late 1950s, as LSD spread from controlled trials to the black market. News reporters gravitated toward research documenting astonishing results with LSD, even as those studies were becoming further removed from the scientific consensus about the drug. Scholars James Coleman, Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel launched the study of the diffusion of tetracycline that resulted in the landmark Medical Innovation, cementing the idea that innovations spread through interpersonal relationships. Allowing for a role for media in informing physicians of the existence of new drugs, the scholars emphasized the apparent importance of social relationships in spreading the determination to actually use them.