Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS / Edition 1

by Peter Baldwin

Overview

Disease and Democracy is the first comparative analysis of how Western democratic nations have coped with AIDS. Peter Baldwin's exploration of divergent approaches to the epidemic in the United States and several European nations is a springboard for a wide-ranging and sophisticated historical analysis of public health practices and policies. In addition to his comprehensive presentation of information on approaches to AIDS, Baldwin's authoritative book provides a new perspective on our most enduring political dilemma: how to reconcile individual liberty with the safety of the community.

Baldwin finds that Western democratic nations have adopted much more varied approaches to AIDS than is commonly recognized. He situates the range of responses to AIDS within the span of past attempts to control contagious disease and discovers the crucial role that history has played in developing these various approaches. Baldwin finds that the various tactics adopted to fight AIDS have sprung largely from those adopted against the classic epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century—especially cholera—and that they reflect the long institutional memories embodied in public health institutions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520251472
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/09/2007
Series:	California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public , #13
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	489
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his books are Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 (1999) and The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875-1975 (1990).

Table of Contents

Foreword by Daniel M. Fox and Samuel L. Milbank
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Slaves to the Past
1. Bodily Fluids and Citizenship
2. What Came First
3. Fighting the Previous War: Traditional Public Health Strategies and AIDS
4. Patients into Prisoners: Responsibility, Crime, and Health
5. Discrimination and Its Discontents: Protecting the Victims
6. Every Man His Own Quarantine Officer: The Voluntary Approach
7. The Polymorphous Politics of Prevention
8. To Die Laughing: Gays and Other Interest Groups
9. Vox Populi Suprema Lex Est: Expertise, Authority, and Democracy
10. Clio Intervenes: The Effect of the Past on Public Health
11. Liberty, Authority, and the State in the AIDS Era

Notes
Index