Black women in white: racial conflict and cooperation in the nursing profession, 1890–1950

Randy Shilts has noted (And the bandplayed on, p. 596), by the time President Reagan delivered his first speech on the epidemic, "36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease; 20,849 had died". Some of the essays in the book do attempt to explain aspects of this extraordinary moral climate. Paula A. Treichler's piece on 'AIDS, gender and bio-medical discourse' is powerfully argued, and exhaustively documented (158 notes, covering 32 pages), and traces the ways in which medical discourse constructed sexuality and gender in such a way that women were at first invisible in the AIDS crisis, precisely because it was defined as a gay disease. Dennis Altman offers a characteristically sharp account of the paradoxical ways in which the male gay community has simultaneously been stigmatized and legitimized by the crisis. Allan Brandt brings to bear his extensive knowledge of past responses to sexually transmitted diseases to reflect on the social policy implications of AIDS. What is lacking, however, is an essay, or essays, which attempt to situate AIDS in our historical present. Susan Sontag (in AIDS and its metaphors, p. 92) has argued that the AIDS crisis is evidence "of a world in which nothing is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does; and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide". Is AIDS then the first post-modern disease? Perhaps the editors can explore this and related questions in a further collection. This volume is a valuable start, but it only scrapes the surface of the complex historical phenomenon we know as "AIDS".