HIV/AIDS: Patient Zero, History, and Popular Culture with Richard McKay
Episode 47 - February 4, 2021
Richard McKay (University of Cambridge) talks to Merle and Lee about his work on the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with a particular focus on Patient Zero and the history of the disease. After speaking about the problematic idea of the term Patient Zero, including its chance development, he discusses the early history of the epidemic and its popularization in broader public culture. He then turns to how these public perceptions of HIV/AIDS, and Covid, shape policy responses to disease along with some possible ways forward for historians to engage in public work in the future.
Further Reading
- Hammonds, Evelynn. “Race, Sex, AIDS: The Construction of ‘Other.’” Radical America 20, no. 6 (November-December 1986): 28-36.
- Jain, S. Lochlann. “The WetNet: What the Oral Polio Vaccine Hypothesis Exposes about Globalized Interspecies Fluid Bonds.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34, no. 4 (December 2020): 504-24.
- McKay, Richard A. “‘Patient Zero’: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 161-94. doi: 10.1353/bhm.2014.0005
- Renfro, Paul M. “Coronavirus is different from AIDS.” Washington Post, April 6, 2020.
- Treichler, Paula. “AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse: Current Contests for Meaning.” In AIDS: The Burdens of History, edited by Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, 190-266. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988.
- Dan Royles. "To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS". (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Our Guest
Richard McKay,
Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.
