Introduction

In the increasingly medicalised societies in which we live, drugs – whether prescribed by doctors or not – are part of a network of knowledge and practices on which multiple agents take effect. Gendered drugs as an articulating concept has a double genealogy: it focuses on drugs as material goods and objects within history and culture, and on the ways in which gender shapes objects and cultures, medical and scientific cultures included. The centrality of the object – drugs – is combined in the contributions to Gendered Drugs and Medicine with studies on gender and science for a historical and sociocultural study of drugs knowledge and practices, and of women as drug scientists, users, clinicians, consumers and, more generally, circulators.