Three Appointed to Pharmacy in History Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief of Pharmacy in History and AIHP Historical Director Lucas Richert has announced the appointment of three distinguished scholars to the journal’s Editorial Board. The appointees—David Courtwright, Paula DeVos, and Ben Urick—join the eight historians previously appointed to the Editorial Board at the time of its formation in 2019.

David Courtwright is Presidential Professor Emeritus at University of North Florida. He writes about drug use and policy in US and world history. His  books include Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Harvard University Press, 1982, revised 2001); Addicts Who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America before 1965 (University of Tennessee Press, 1989, revised 2012); Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2001); and The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).

David’s drug-related articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Annual Review of Public Health, Addiction, BioSocieties, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Business History, and Drug and Alcohol Dependence. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which in 2015 named him an inaugural recipient of its Public Scholar Award. In 2002 the College of Problems on Drug Dependence conferred its Media Award on Forces of Habit, which has become a standard history of global drug use and a widely read introduction to the field.

Paula DeVos is Professor of History at San Diego State University. Her scholarly work focuses on the long history of Galenic pharmacy from the ancient Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America.

She is co-editor of Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires (Stanford 2009) and has published articles on natural history and the history of early pharmacology and materia medica in venues such as Isis, History of Science, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, among others. She is author of a forthcoming book entitled Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain (University of Pittsburgh Press, Fall 2020).

Ben Urick is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Medication Optimization in the Division of Practice Advancement and Clinical Education at the University of North Carolina Eshelman School of Pharmacy. As a pharmacist and health services researcher, he enjoys combining an understanding of historical pharmacy practice transformations with current research on pharmacists’ impact on value-based care.

He has deep interest in the history of pharmacy practice in the twentieth century with an emphasis on practice and policy changes in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He also teaches about the history of pharmacy and has authored or co-authored several scholarly works on pharmacy practice in the twentieth century. His primary scholarship focuses on the impact of pharmacy services in healthcare value and on methods for reliable and valid provider profiling within value-based payment models.

Pharmacy in History is AIHP’s academic, peer-reviewed journal. The Editorial Board assists the journal’s editorial team in evaluating manuscripts for publication.