For three decades Robert Bud has maintained two careers in synergy. He is an important light in the world of science museums, and especially London's Science Museum, where latterly he has led an impressive development of online resources. In parallel, he has maintained a commendable flow of books and articles on pharmaceuticals and biotechnologies. This present work is something of a tour de force. With the museologist's feel for material culture and ‘object lessons’, Bud uses penicillin as a window on science and industry, medicine and popular attitudes, and the comparative politics of nations during and after the Second World War. The breadth is notable, the material rich and the narrative generally compelling.

The strengths of this book include discussions of ‘wonder drugs’, ‘magic bullets’ and the increased statutory control of drugs after sulphanilamide; a revision of the Fleming and Florey story showing how Florey was ‘promoted’ though the media of postwar Britain in support of the charity hospitals and the private companies threatened by nationalization; and the roles of empirical craft, chance and agriculture in the industrialization of penicillin production. The chapter on wartime medicine nicely integrates early penicillin use with the organized management of soldiers' wounds, and with the prominence of venereal disease. Bud illuminates the old and influential story of British resentment of the American patents on penicillin, but he also includes a wonderful comparative section on several continental countries and Japan. He then turns to penicillin's promotion and use: massively overproduced and heavily marketed, it was used for many more conditions than it cured, though doctors knew well enough that drug resistance could soon be a problem. The fear of resistance helped ensure that in Britain it was available only by prescription, but it did not prevent medical overuse; indeed, Bud suggests that the cost of antibiotics to the NHS was a major reason for the introduction of prescription charges. The complex politics of ‘resistance’ and controls occupies the rest of the book; sometimes there are a few too many stories, but there are lots of generally useful insights, for example about focus groups, patients and consumerism in the 1950s. Throughout the book, the integration of a wide range of topics and of countries is very impressive.

My (small) reservations largely concern the treatment of medicine. Bud is keen to present penicillin as both a marker and the main cause of a transformation in popular attitudes to infectious disease. So, we learn, before penicillin, infections were seen as multicausal and as reflecting failures of behaviour (which were more or less failures of morals); with penicillin, when many infections were easily cured, the simple chemical remedy meant that causes other than germs no longer mattered much. There is much to recommend this reading, especially as a corrective to an alternative commonplace – that it was the discovery of germs which reduced disease causation to specific material entities. Bud is surely right that only when the germs could be killed in the body did they appear as the operative cause; until then (and since?), the complexities of prevention, resistance and the management of symptoms continued to loom large.

But he perhaps overplays the argument when he claims that for pre-war patients, medicines were a last resort (p. 103). In fact most patients then went to doctors expecting to get pills or a bottle, as they still do. That they had faith in pills which did little may help explain why they were doubly keen to get the miraculous penicillin, even for diseases that were said not to be bacterial but behaved in similar ways and might have bacterial complications. These customary expectations helped companies expand the market, and helped germs become resistant, as Bud so thoroughly demonstrates.

Twenty years ago the history of pharmaceuticals was a redoubt of antiquarianism and of medico-industrial triumphalism; germs were simple and they were historical losers. Now, as René Dubos and others foresaw, we have been forced to subtler and more ecological accounts of microbes: our histories of targets and bullets have come to stress complexities, struggles and reverses. Not least by his excellent illustrations, Bud shows us the old hopes through a much less sanguine frame. Without myself being unduly progressive about histories, it seems only fair to say that Bud's book is excellent evidence of the maturity of the social history of science, technology and medicine – and indeed of its unity, at least for topics such as this one.