AIDS and the End of the Golden Age of Medicine

Abstract

The appearance of AIDS in 1981 marks not only a critical shift in the atmosphere of optimism surrounding the ‘conquest’ of infectious diseases, but also a break with the previous history of medicine. Historians of medicine tend to locate AIDS as the latest in a long line of plagues. Yet the AIDS pandemic was, and still is, different: perhaps as much a socio-cultural and political phenomenon as a medical one. Arguably, any new infectious disease that happened to appear at that juncture in history would have created a media storm greater than did those infectious diseases of just a few years earlier. However, the AIDS epidemic’s heady cocktail of sex, drugs, race, religion and politics created a societal and media event that would irrevocably alter the cultural landscape.