Suchergebnisse

A review essay on books by: Bruce Nussbaum, Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight against AIDS (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990); & Mirko D. Grmek, History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic (Maulitz, Russell C., & Duffin, Jacalyn [Trs], Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1990 [see listings in IRPS No. 65]). Nussbaum candidly examines the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) epidemic through an analysis of the incestuous relationship between three groups: drug companies; government agencies, including the Federal Drug Administration, National Instit of Health, & National Instit of Allergy & Infectious Disease; & principal investigators (PIs), a nebulous group of private & university-based researchers. Nussbaum argues that the inclusion of PIs receiving funding from Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturer of the AIDS drug AZT, on the federal regulatory boards that assessed the drug represented a clear conflict of interest. This argument, however, is obfuscated by prose that dramatizes rather than clarifies the collusion between the different institutions involved in the fight against AIDS. Grmek's book, lucidly written in a fashion reminiscent of nineteenth-century accounts of cholera, presents a general history of the AIDS epidemic, focusing on its origins in Africa, the Americas, & Europe. A key text in the dissemination of AIDS knowledge, the book is praised for its scholarly approach to the subject, but assailed for an implicit condemnation of homosexuality. W. Howard

In the 1820s, several years before Braille was invented, Therese-Adele Husson, a young blind woman from provincial France, wrote an audacious manifesto about her life, French society, and her hopes for the future. Through extensive research and scholarly detective work, authors Catherine Kudlick and Zina Weygand have rescued this intriguing woman and the remarkable story of her life and tragic death from obscurity, giving readers a rare look into a world recorded by an unlikely historical figure. Reflections is one of the earliest recorded manifestations of group solidarity among people with the same disability, advocating self-sufficiency and independence on the part of blind people, encouraging education for all blind children, and exploring gender roles for both men and women. Resolutely defying the sense of "otherness" which pervades discourse about the disabled, Husson instead convinces us that that blindness offers a fresh and important perspective on both history and ourselves. In rescuing this important historical account and recreating the life of an obscure but potent figure, Weygand and Kudlick have awakened a perspective that transcends time and which, ultimately, remaps our inherent ideas of physical sensibility