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  • Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic

  • By: Richard A. McKay
  • Narrated by: Paul Woodson
  • Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (10 ratings)
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Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic

By: Richard A. McKay
Narrated by: Paul Woodson
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Summary

In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaetan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed - and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak.

McKay shows how investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of patient zero-adopting, challenging, and redirecting its powerful meanings - as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first 15 years of an unfolding epidemic. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.

©2017 The University of Chicago (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: LGBTQ+

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Not An Evidenced Persuasion; An Attack

This was deeply disappointing to me. I couldn’t get through it. By chapter four it came across as hammering and repetitive with very little substance. Its title led me to hope it would be a sort of memoir of Dugas, un-demonising him and providing a more rounded, contextualised view of him and his role in the AIDS epidemic relative to others’ roles. That would have been interesting and persuasive to me. Instead, it seems to draw heavily on secondary analysis of commentary on Dugas provided in the esteemed journalistic classic, ‘And the Band Played On’, by journalist Randy Schiltz.

The author of the book I am reviewing now rightly criticises the unfounded and/or flawed attacking of marginalised groups, and the othering of whole continents, as cesspools and walking disease vectors. He gives an interesting and helpful contextualisation of this common approach and human behaviour in the context of things like the Black Death and even crime detection to show how people are wont to laser in on individual people, specific peoples, and/or specific places as prime ‘culprits’ in the uncontrolled and even ostensibly knowing, wilful and intended spread of crime or disease, rightly criticising this for the mythology it usually is.

He also rightly points out that Dugas cannot have been the monster portrayed in Band. Otherwise he’d be notorious in household memory on a level with ‘Doctor’ Harold Shipman, or Graham Young, the ‘Teacup Poisoner’. The fact that he’s not is very telling in its own right. If there was as much hard evidence of Dugas’s intentional spreading of AIDS as Schiltz maintains in Band, it would be more than enough grounds on which to at least detain, if not convict him, under SOME legal charge or other pre-existing at the time.

These aspects all function well as an introduction, and draw the reader in. Unfortunately after that the book descends into little more than dissecting Schiltz’s character, biography, political position, personal motivations, journalistic leadings and self-professed claims as contributing factors towards a supposed campaign of blame and name-blackening criticism towards Schiltz in order to expose his lies about Dugas, thus exonerating the latter’s name.

One can’t help but sense a loss of the primary goal of this book taking place in the process - was it written primarily to bring down Schiltz, or primarily to illuminate the real Dugas in an alternative light to the one Schiltz casts him in? Thus far, it has failed to do the latter, and by now I’ve lost the will to push on in the slim hope that it may yet make a course adjustment to this effect. Even if it did, my criticisms of how long it has taken to even start to do that would remain, hence reviewing without having finished the book.

It’s not a bad book at all on AIDS coverage and representation during the epidemic, and in terms of the memory of the epidemic subsequently. It’s not bad if you want a commentary on supposed journalistic impartiality and public risk versus patient confidentiality and rights when said patient is both free and fully mobile yet able to transmit serious disease. And if you like seeing prominent celebrated figureheads and their works torn down and scathingly critiqued along with their basic characters and motivations, fair enough - you’ll like this. But if you were coming here looking for the same sort of thing I was, don’t bother.

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