David Rothman


David Rothman is professor of Social Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He also serves as the president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession. Rothman's work has focused on the social history of American medicine and current health care practices. His research has also explored human rights in medicine, including organ trafficking, AIDS, and the ethics of research in developing countries.
Rothman lives in New York City with his wife and frequent co-author, Professor Sheila M. Rothman. He has 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.

Career

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’ roots to the post-Revolution social turmoil and reformers’ desire for perfectly ordered spaces."
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 in 2003. IMAP is dedicated to medical professionalism. He and Susan Chimonas co-authored “New Federal Guidelines for Physician-Pharmaceutical Industry Relations”, which was published in 2005. He and Sheila Rothman co-authored “Marketing HPV Vaccine”, which was published 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 has co-chaired two task forces. The recommendations of these task forces were published 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:

Publications