AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease

When AIDS was first recognized in 1981, most experts believed that it was a plague, a virulent unexpected disease. They thought AIDS, as a plague, would resemble the great epidemics of the past: it would be devastating but would soon subside, perhaps never to return. By the middle 1980s, however, it became increasingly clear that AIDS was a chronic infection, not a classic plague.

In this follow—up to AIDS: The Burdens of History, editors Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox present essays that d...