Henry K. Beecher - Beecher and "the Placebo Effect"

Beecher and "the Placebo Effect"

The general literature commonly misattributes the term "placebo effect" to Henry K. Beecher's 1955 paper The Powerful Placebo. While this paper did not introduce the idea of placebo reactions (the term had been first used by Graves in 1920), its importance was that it stressed—for the first time—the necessity of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. In his 1955 paper, Beecher only speaks of placebo effects on specific occasions when he is contrasting them with drug effects. His 1955 paper constantly and correctly speaks of "placebo reactors" and "placebo non-reactors"; furthermore, Beecher (1952), Beecher, Keats, Mosteller, and Lasagna (1953), Beecher (1959), consistently and correctly speak of "placebo reactors" and "placebo non-reactors"; they never speak of any "placebo effect"; and, finally, in his Research and the Individual: Human Studies (1970), Beecher simply speaks of "placebos".