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Cortisone, initially known as 'compound E' was the medical sensation of the late 1940s and early 1950s. As early as April 1949, only a week after Philip Hench and colleagues first described the potential of 'compound E' at a Mayo Clinic seminar, the New York Times reported the drug's promise as a 'modern miracle' in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Given its high profile, it is unsurprising that historians of medicine have been attracted to study the innovation of cortisone. It arrived at the end of a decade of 'therapeutic revolutions', kicked off by penicillin transforming the treatment of bacterial infections and ending with hopes of a revolution in the treatment of non-infectious, chronic inflammatory diseases. Despite these studies of cortisone's introduction, few historians have taken the story forward and considered how cortisone was adopted and adapted into clinical practice. This article tells the longer of how the drug and its derivatives were taken from research laboratories and integrated into clinical practice; what has in recent decades become known as translational medicine (TM). In exploring cortisone's first decade in Britain, we focus specifically on its role in the treatment of RA. Our approach is always to consider cortisone's use in the context of other treatments available to clinicians, and at local and national institutional settings. We do not discuss the many other therapeutic uses of cortisone, which ranged for topical applications for skin diseases to the management of cancers, especially childhood leukaemia, nor do we discuss its close analogue ACTH-AdenoCorticoTropic Hormone. We think there are lessons in our study for TM policies today.

In this article we explore the different trajectories of this one drug, phenylbutazone, across two species, humans and horses in the period 1950-2000. The essay begins by following the introduction of the drug into human medicine in the early 1950s. It promised to be a less costly alternative to cortisone, one of the "wonder drugs" of the era, in the treatment of rheumatic conditions. Both drugs appeared to offer symptomatic relief rather than a cure, and did so with the risk of side effects, which with phenylbutazone were potentially so severe that it was eventually banned from human use, for all but a few diseases, in the early 1980s. Phenylbutazone had been used with other animals for many years without the same issues, but in the 1980s its uses in veterinary medicine, especially in horses, came under increased scrutiny, but for quite different reasons. The focus was primarily the equity, economics, and ethics of competition in equine sports, with differences in cross-species biology and medicine playing a secondary role. The story of phenylbutazone, a single drug, shows how the different biologies and social roles of its human/animal subjects resulted in very different and changing uses. While the drug had a seemingly common impact on pain and inflammation, there were inter-species differences in the drug's metabolism, the conditions treated, dosages, and, crucially, in intended clinical outcomes and perceptions of its benefits and risks.