Historically, AIDS is just one of a series of dreaded diseases that have aroused both great fear and irrational actions. The previous diseases, including bubonic plague, syphilis, tuberculosis, leprosy and cancer, have evoked such a sense of dread that rational moves to halt the disease have become compromised.; This text examines the deep sense of fear that AIDS evokes, stigmatizing those who suffer from the disease, as well as their families and caregivers. Until AIDS can be seen for what it actually is - a life-threatening disease - policies providing for humane treatment will not evolve. The book also emphasizes that diseases are more than biological phenomena or individual catastrophes - they are profoundly social events. The ways in which diseases are spread and treated are strongly influenced by larger sociological considerations, and they may have the capacity to change social institutions or society Itself. Rooting Aids In The History Of Diseases, The First Part Of The book reviews the nature, history and responses of earlier dreaded diseases. The next section examines AIDS itself, proposed as the archetypal dreaded disease. Already creating a sense of panic, AIDS is also shown to be a social disease, likely to have significant effects on the social order. Thus, only by containing the epidemic of fear and controlling the resulting irrationality, can the AIDS epidemic be halted.
Alcabes persuasively argues that people's anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question--or the actual risks of contagion--but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood. b&w illustration insert.
My Tropic of Cancer: Living & Dying With a Dread Disease tells the story of cancer's passage through three generations of the Mintie family. This deeply personal account relates the heartbreak, hope and occasional hilarity that travel with any lethal diagnosis. Tropic includes gritty, day-today detail of the author's life as a cancer patient, and the wider environmental, social and political milieus of cancer's appearance. It shares one family's psychological and spiritual responses to cancer, inviting the reader along on an intimate, inter-generational awakening the perils and possibilities that travel with this extraordinary disease. Tropic tells, finally, an exuberantly hopeful story, one that will encourage any family touched by cancer to find its own authentic, life-affirming and human response.