Werth, whose books include The Billion-Dollar Molecule (1994), opens with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which did not spare the U.S., whose doctors wrote millions of prescriptions that cured no one. He then delivers an eye-opening history of the American pharmaceutical industry featuring little-known geniuses (James Conant, Max Tishler, Selman Waksman), as well as commercial labs—“like wildcatters in the vicinity of an oil strike”—that include Merck, Squibb, and Eli Lilly. World War I produced a bonanza, as the U.S. seized American branches of Germany’s chemical industry—then the world’s best. Until the 1930s, profit leaders were newly discovered vitamins. Penicillin changed everything. Although discovered in Britain, it required a vast American industrial program to produce commercial quantities. Penicillin was not patented, so any company could make it, and profits were minimal. In any case, making money from prescription medicines was considered disreputable at the time. This changed after World War II. Government funding had given companies a massive infrastructure—mostly huge vats of bacteria already producing antibiotics besides penicillin, a “miracle drug” that enraptured the general public no less than the medical profession. This cured pharmaceutical companies of their objection to profits. They established research departments, hired chemists, patented discoveries, and recruited sales personnel to promote products to doctors. The result was more miracle drugs and profits. Werth ends with 1962 Senate hearings that revealed a great deal of shady behavior and overcharging and resulted in a strong reform bill that, after vigorous lobbying, was gutted—and then rescued by the thalidomide disaster; a morning-sickness pill popular in Europe, thalidomide produced thousands of babies with birth defects. An engrossing read, the book is occasionally interrupted by digressions, such as a long account of the spread of nuclear weapons and a chapter recounting one patient’s unusual psychiatric side effect to cortisone.