Though this book has one name on the front cover, many people helped bring it into being.
Katie Helke, acquisitions editor at the MIT Press, first suggested that I write for this series at the 2017 Society for the History of Technology conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am grateful for her encouragement.
I thank Heather Munro Prescott and the two anonymous readers of an earlier version for their helpful suggestions. Thanks also to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History for a 2017 Travel-to-Collections Award, which led to finding the Parke, Davis catalogs and many of this book’s illustrations. Jim Roan, the museum’s reference librarian, and Diane Wendt, deputy chair and associate curator of the museum’s Division of Medicine and Science, were generous with their time and advice. I am likewise grateful to the New England Research Fellowship Consortium for a travel grant that supported the discovery of additional sources at Smith College, the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
This book benefitted from conversations with Laura Kelly, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, and the audience at the Reproductive and Sexual Health Activism, c. 1960–Present Workshop in Glasgow, Scotland, in July 2018. I also thank Jessica Borge, Micheline Egan, Prince Guma, Alana Harris, Rebecca Hodes, Claire L. Jones, Miriam Klemm, Kate Law, Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Liz McMahon, Alejandra Osorio, Lucia Pozzi, Caroline Rusterholz, and Laura Ann Twagira for sharing their work, source ideas, and thoughts with me. The thoughtful hospitality of Paul Maddern at the River Mill Writer’s Retreat in Northern Ireland sustained me in a period of intense composition.
My friends and family members Tobias Boll, Michele Campbell, Kate Costello, Michelle Cunningham-Wandel, Stefan Glatzl, Kyla Jemison, Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Clark A. Pomerleau, Charles Peters, Lora Stephan, and Katie Watson, along with my supervisor, Christoph Merkelbach, supported me throughout the research and writing of this book. I could not ask for a more loving set of parents and relatives than Donald S. and Diane K. Drucker, Alan and Adrienne Drucker, and Charles and Betty Watson.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Mark A. Price, my best bud.