In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes...

In the summer of 1919, a slight but otherwise healthy 15-year-old English Navy recruit succumbed to epileptic fits so severe, his doctor wrote, “he threw five strong men about like kittens.” Navy medics exhausted options to treat the boy, and sent him home. His family doctor prescribed a testicular extract on the theory that the boy’s seizures could be related to his delayed sexual development....

A 52-year-old female patient, with a long history of chronic low back pain treated over time with various modalities including, recently, opioids, goes on Friday evening to the emergency room for, she says, “excruciating, paralyzing, back pain.” The house officer working her up finds that she just ran out of the pain medications she was previously on; his evaluation is totally negative; the pat...