Dissertations in the History of Pharmacy

Clayton, Denise Hammock. “Essays in health economics,” University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., 2015, 102 p., 3712196.

The author looks at how public health programs and prescription drug insurance affect health and health-related behaviors and expenditures. The first chapter examines the effect of Medicaid prescription drug coverage on state-level mortality using the implementation period as a natural experiment. The second chapter looks at state-level changes in life expectancy from the 1970s to 2000s and explores the role of state prescription drug programs as a possible explanatory variable. The third chapter examines how health care expenditures change with prescription drug insurance status.

Hollingsworth, Philip Clark. “The Image of Opium and Morphine in Hispanic “Modernista” Literature, 1876-1949,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Ph.D., 2015, 199 p., 3703804.

“The Image of Opium and Morphine in Hispanic ‘Modernista’ Literature, 1876-1949” explores the images of opium and morphine in Hispanic prose and poetry of the turn of the twentieth century. This study examines the use of opiates in Hispanic literature in relation to society, the artist and the artistic process in four different manifestations: opium as parallel to the literary process, opiates’ role in the modernista aesthetic agenda, the role of morphine in anti-dandy/anti-European literature and opium smoke as a symbol of national illness and degeneration in sinophobic literature. The dissertation concludes that the use of opiates in Hispanic prose and poetry is fundamental to the relationship of the artist to their country’s role in the modernization process. The corpus of the dissertation includes the works of canonical authors such as José Asunción Silva, Rubén Darío, and Emilia Pardo Bazán but also incorporates writers on the margins of canonical study such as José María Vargas Vila, Santiago Rusiñol and Francisco Villaespesa. By viewing these works through the lens of opiate consumption, this dissertation will open a new field in Hispanic literary studies and will provide a new perspective on the Modernisms of Spain and Spanish America in relation to nation building, national identity and discourses of illness.