The Sounds of Furious Living

Everyday Unorthodoxies in an Era of AIDS
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9788-3507-8
Verlag: Rutgers University Press

Buch, Englisch, 274 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 366 g

Reihe: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious “gay cancer” first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years, the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth century’s largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors who took to the streets to demand “drugs into bodies.” And yet not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The theatre of their protests was not the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village but rather their bodies. And their language was not the riotous chants of public demonstration but the often-invisible embrace of contrarian systems for defining and treating their disease. The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the 19th and 20th centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the 20th century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the 21st century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kelly, Matthew

Fachgebiete

• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Invalidität, Krankheit und Abhängigkeit: Soziale Aspekte
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Präventivmedizin, Gesundheitsförderung, Medizinisches Screening
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Public Health, Gesundheitsmanagement, Gesundheitsökonomie, Gesundheitspolitik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Acknowledging the Everyday
Everyday Unorthodoxies: Factors Contributing to the Obscuration of Unorthodox AIDS Activism from Historical Scholarship
A Consideration of Methodological Objections
A Consideration of Utilitarian Objections
A Consideration of Ethical Objections
 
Part I Irregular and Alternative Medicine in Historical Perspective
 
Chapter 1: Situating Unorthodox AIDS Activism within the History of Medicine in the US
Understanding Irregular and Alternative Health Practices: An Appeal for a Therapeutic Borderland Model
Enduring Currents: The Shadow of Heroic Medicine
Enduring Currents: Distaste for Dogma
Enduring Currents: Anti-Authoritarian Sentiment
Enduring Currents: Antimodern Sentiment
 
Part II The Soils of Unorthodoxy
 
Chapter 2: A Broken Model – 20th Century Transformations in the Social Constructions of Health and Disease
Sanctioned Meaning: Locating AIDS within History
Unsanctioned Interpretations: The Meanings of History
A Changing Past: Transformations in Constructions of Disease and Health
Conclusion: A Past Rendered Homeless
 
Chapter 3: A Broken Trust: The Changing Character of Healthcare
A Sanctioned Distrust: The Rise of Biomedical Ethics
The Overmedicated Society
A Fall from Grace: The Rise of Post-War Critiques of the Physician
The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich’s Radical Dissent
 
Part III The Emergence and Growth of Unorthodox AIDS Activism
 
Chapter 4: Everyday Unorthodoxies and the People with AIDS Coalition (PWAC)
A Bill of Rights, A War Bulletin, and the Birth of the PWAC
Disputed Words: Challenges to Universal Fatality Narratives
Disputed Actions: PWAC Activism and Allegations of “Fourth or Fifth Rate” Science
Disputed Thoughts: HIV, AIDS and the “Unholy Holy War”
Disputed Cures: Curses, Cures and the “Promiscuous Use” of AZT
Embracing Unorthodoxies: PWAC Contributors’ Embrace of Alternative Health Systems
Conclusion: Quacks, Dupes and the Empowerment of PWAs
 
Chapter 5: Patient Heal Thyself – The History of Health Education AIDS Liaisons (HEAL)
The Consonant Contrarians: HEAL’s Early Years
The Radicalization of Health Holism: A Divisive Multifactoriality
The Radicalization of Health Holism: From Holistic Interdependency to an Isolating Dissidence
Remembering HEAL
 
Conclusion: Listening to and Learning from the Sounds of Furious Living
The Sounds of Furious Living – Lessons for the Practice of Historical Scholarship
The Sounds of Furious Living – Lessons for the Practice of Public Health and Medicine
The Promise and Peril of Furiously Lived Lives: Beyond Healing