Henri Ellenberger's ethnopsychiatry is the first synthesis in the French language on this hybrid discipline at the crossroads of psychiatry and ethnology, which has met with tremendous success in recent decades. This body of work is of great interest within the history of medicine, humanities, and social sciences.

Sismondo describes what happens within the chain from the design of the clinical trial to the diffusion of drug results, and highlights what he calls "ghost-management", which allows for a high degree of control of drug science by the pharmaceutical industry to influence doctors' prescriptions.