David Rothman (medical historian)

David Jay Rothman (April 30, 1937 − August 31, 2020) was professor of Social Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He also served as the president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP). Rothman's work focused on the social history of American medicine and current health care practices. His research also explored human rights in medicine, including organ trafficking, AIDS, and the ethics of research in developing countries.

Rothman lived in New York City with his wife and frequent co-author, Professor Sheila M. Rothman. He had two children. His daughter, Micol Rothman, is an endocrinologist in Denver, working with gender transitioning individuals. His son, Matthew Rothman, is on faculty at the MIT Sloan School of Finance, a managing director at Goldman Sachs and renowned quantitative researcher.

Education
Rothman earned his B.A. from Columbia University in 1958 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964.

Career
After earning his Ph.D., Rothman returning to Columbia and rose to the rank of Professor of History by 1971.

In 1971 Rothman published The Discovery of the Asylum, which explores mental hospitals, prisons, and almshouses. The book was co-winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. According to a 2019 review, the book "effectively launched the contemporary field of prison history. Rothman traced the first modern prisons' (1820s–1850s) roots to the post-Revolution social turmoil and reformers' desire for perfectly ordered spaces."

In 2000 Rothman published Medical Professionalism; Focusing on the Real Issues. With an endowment from the Open Society Institute and George Soros, Rothman founded the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) in 2003. IMAP is dedicated to medical professionalism. He and Sheila Rothman co-authored Marketing HPV Vaccine, which was published in 2009. Also in 2009, Professional Medical Associations and Their Relationships with Industry: A Proposal for Controlling Conflicts of Interest was published.

He also co-authored From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data, published in 2010. Medical Communication Companies and Industry Grants was published in 2013 and Political Polarization of Physicians in the United States: An Analysis of Campaign Contributions to Federal Elections, 1991 Through 2012 in 2014.

Task forces
Rothman co-chaired two task forces. The recommendations of these task forces were published in 2006 in the Journal of the American Medical Association under the title Health Industry Practices that Create Conflicts of Interest: A Policy Proposal for Academic Medical Centers.

Together with the Open Society Foundations, Rothman convened a task force to address physician involvement in detention, interrogation, and torture. A resulting report entitled Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror was published in November 2013.

"The Shame of Medical Research"
In an article titled "The Shame of Medical Research" that was published in November 2000, Rothman wrote:

"Until the 1990s American medical researchers performed most of their experiments on other Americans—frequently choosing subjects who were poor and vulnerable. Now, however, they are increasingly likely to conduct their investigations in third world countries on subjects who are even poorer and more vulnerable. Part of the reason is AIDS—the first modern infectious disease to strike the developed and developing world simultaneously and to give both a large stake in finding a cure. Part of the reason, too, is the mounting financial and regulatory burdens of research in the rich nations, which cause investigators, both from universities and drug companies, to go to the poorer countries to test new treatments. Whatever the reason, practice has overwhelmed ethics. The major international codes on human experimentation, including the principles proclaimed at Nuremberg in 1947 and the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki in 1964, all say that the well-being of the subject always should take precedence over the needs of science or the interests of society, and that doctors must obtain 'the subject's freely informed consent.' But neither these codes nor the Western groups concerned with medical ethics have had the developing countries in mind. Countries in which clinical trials are now conducted are often too poor to pay for the medicines that are successfully tested. And the people recruited for those trials very seldom get the kind of medical care the participants in trials in prosperous countries can expect. Whether Western principles covering the treatment of people who are the subjects of research can and should be applied in Africa and Asia has become a bitterly debated question."

Publications

 * Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869-1901 (1966)
 * The Discovery of the Asylum (1971)
 * Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (1980)
 * The Willowbrook Wars (1984, co-authored with Sheila Rothman)
 * Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision-making (1991)
 * Medicine and Western Civilization (1995, co-edited with Steven Marcus and Stephanie Kiceluk)
 * Beginnings Count: The Technological Imperative in American Health Care (1997)
 * The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement (2003, co-authored with Sheila Rothman)
 * Trust Is Not Enough (2006, co-authored with Sheila Rothman)
 * Medical Professionalism in the New Information Age (2010, co-edited with David Blumenthal)