The History of Clinical Trials: From Fake Exorcisms to Testing Today

Alexis Pedrick joins Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti to bring you an episode from Tiny Matters, an award-winning podcast from the American Chemical Society produced by Multitude.

The episode, which originally aired in February 2026, explores the surprising origins and evolution of one of modern medicine's most important tools: the clinical trial. Tiny Matters follows the development of experimental design across centuries to modern-day randomized control trials and the debates about their limitations, trying to answer the question, "How do we know whether a treatment truly works?"

Credits

Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez

Resource List

Placebo Controls, Exorcisms and the Devil 

The Eight Wars of Religion (1562–1598)

The Emergence of the Randomized, Controlled Trial

The Emergence of the Randomized Controlled Trial: Origins to 1980 

Streptomycin Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis

Estimated Costs of Pivotal Trials for Novel Therapeutic Agents Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, 2015-2016  

Conservative Treatment of Acute Appendicitis: An Overview

Most Patients with Appendicitis Can Have Antibiotics as Their First Treatment, Rather than Appendectomy

Assessing the Gold Standard—Lessons from the History of RCTs