Postscript: reflections on HIV/AIDS and history

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511614026.011

10 - Postscript: reflections on HIV/AIDS and history

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010

Shula Marks and

Edited by

Melissa Parker and

Shula Marks: Affiliation:
Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, WC1H 0XG
George T. H. Ellison: Affiliation:
Professor of Public Health and Director of the Institute of Primary Care and Public Health, South Bank University, London
George Ellison: Affiliation:
South Bank University, London
Melissa Parker: Affiliation:
Brunel University
Catherine Campbell: Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science

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Summary

Some 10 years ago, the British medical historian Virginia Berridge (1992a: 326), strikingly declared: ‘History and historians have had a significant role in interpreting the AIDS epidemic … History, in some national responses to AIDS, became a direct policy-relevant science.’ At the outset, she argued, history was used in two ways: as a form of background knowledge; and as ‘“historical partisanship”, the use of historical example to advance particular policy positions’ (Berridge, 1992a: 326). It entered the policy debate directly and, at least in the UK, ensured a liberal non-punitive approach to people with HIV/AIDS. Analysing the chapters in the pioneering volume edited by Elizabeth Fee and Daniel Fox (1989) she showed how, in the early days of the disease, the presence of historians at international conferences was assiduously courted in the United States and the UK. They were called on to deal with earlier public health and popular responses to the spread of infectious (especially sexually transmitted) disease – quarantine and compulsory vaccination – all of which had relevance to the contemporary debate. Even more surprisingly, she maintained, leading medical authorities (notably Sir Donald Acheson, Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health, and Michael Adler at the Middlesex Hospital) had themselves drawn direct analogies with the past and addressed historical precedents in their advocacy of a liberal public health policy (Berridge, 1992b; see also: Berridge, 1992a; Berridge and Strong, 1993; Berridge, 1996).

Type: Chapter
Information: Learning from HIV and AIDS , pp. 268 - 292

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511614026.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

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