Editor's Introduction to the 1988 AIDS Edition

the papers in this issue were presented at a public conference entitled "In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease," sponsored by Social Research. It was held in January at the New School for Social Research and was the first in what we hope will be a series of such conferences. The conference was made possible by the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. The initial plans for this conference emerged at a planning meeting in the fall of 1986 attended by Gert H. Brieger, William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins; John Hollander, poet and professor of English at Yale University; Shirley Lindenbaum, anthropologist and colleague at the Graduate Faculty of the New School; Dorothy Nelkin, professor, Program on Science, Technology and Society, Cornell University, currently Clare Boothe Luce Visiting Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University; Kenneth Prewitt, political scientist and vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation; Susan Sontag, novelist and critic; Paul Starr, sociologist and professor at Princeton University; Jamie Walkup, editorial associate and co-organizer of the conference, and myself.

An exhibit, "In Time of Plague: Five Centuries of Infectious Disease in the Visual Arts," was held at the American Museum of Natural History in conjunction with the conference. It was made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Its curators were Daniel Fox, professor of humanities in medicine, State University of New York, Stonybrook, and Diane R. Karp, art historian and freelance curator. The exhibit was jointly sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the New School for Social Research. The medal pictured on the cover is one of the artifacts from that exhibit.

The conference was organized with the expectation that an open discussion among scientists and scholars might help to place the current alarming outbreak of AIDS in perspective by considering it in the context of the social history of past lethal epidemics. We thought that focusing attention on the many ways in which diseases, particularly catastrophic infectious and contagious diseases, are and have been both biologically and socially defined might help lead the way to a calmer and more effective public response to the problem.

Why, you might well ask, if we hoped the conference and this subsequent issue of Social Research might help create the possibility of a calmer and more reasoned response to AIDS, did we give it so ominous and threatening a title as "In Time of Plague"? There are at least two reasons. First, for good or ill the word "plague" effectively captures the emotional associations frequently engendered by reports about AIDS. The word acknowledges the unfamiliar fears it has awakened. After decades of dividing our time between apocalyptic fears of nuclear holocaust and private fears of personal ruin, we now face a threat that is profoundly social, requiring a public, community response. Most of us until recently have assumed, perhaps without thinking, that the number of life-threatening infectious diseases was finite, soon to be cured and prevented by medical science. So the study of plagues was delegated exclusively to medical and social historians. Now it appears that this idea that we stand outside our own history, that we, unlike our forebears, are immune to widespread medical disasters, is very doubtful.

The word "plague" appears in the title for a more specific reason as well. Its presence points the way to the problem that must be addressed. In fact, the problem we face can be seen in the very considerations that made the word seem appropriate, for the exotic connotations of the term exercise their influence over our emotions, even when the word itself is not spoken. The fact is that the past is both too much and too little with us in our public deliberations about AIDS; its images of disease affect us precisely because we so rarely take them into account. The hope is that these scholarly discussions will allow our present and our past to speak with each other. With luck they may permit us to discern the similarities between...