Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic

With admirable precision, he offers by contrast a dynamic new history of the early AIDS crisis in North America, superbly contextualized. “After a decade of meticulous, painstaking research, McKay unravels the media and medical discourses that created the ultimate twentieth-century super-villain. With ethical urgency, he fashions a trustworthy, inspiring biography of Gaétan Dugas, demanding sophisticated moral reflection.”

Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.. How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay interprets a wealth of archival sources and interviews to demonstrate how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas—and fears—about contagion and social disorder. The search for a “patient zero”—popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic—has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaétan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed—and w