The Sounds of Furious Living: Everyday Unorthodoxies in an Era of AIDS

Matthew Kelly

Published by Rutgers University Press 2024

The Sounds of Furious Living

Everyday Unorthodoxies in an Era of AIDS

Matthew Kelly

In the series Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978835115

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the twentieth century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the twenty-first 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.

Author / Editor information

Matthew Kelly earned a PhD in sociomedical sciences and an MPH from Columbia University, where he was honored with the Marisa de Castro Benton Award. Prior to that, he graduated from Brown University. He currently is pursuing a medical degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Reviews

“The Sounds of Furious Living fits within the history of 'unorthodox' medicine, but in a more nuanced and theoretical way, providing new insight into this tradition that never really went away—there is nothing like this out there now. Matthew Kelly has done an impressive job.”— Susan Reverby, author of Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Acronyms Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Acknowledging the Everyday Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I: The Soils of Unorthodoxy: Irregular and Alternative Medicine in U.S. History
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
1 Situating Unorthodox AIDS Activism within the History of Medicine in the United States Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2 A Broken Model: Twentieth-Century Transformations in the Social Constructions of Health and Disease Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
3 A Broken Trust: The Changing Character of Health Care Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
Part II: The Seeds of Unorthodoxy: The Emergence of Unorthodox Aids Activism
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
4 Everyday Unorthodoxies and the People with AIDS Coalition (PWAC) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
5 Patient, Heal Thyself: The History of Health Education AIDS Liaison (HEAL) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
Conclusion: Listening to and Learning from the Sounds of Furious Living Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251

Language: English
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 268
Illustrations
- Other: 0 illustrations
Keywords: history; public health; health; hiv; aids; lgbt; lgbtq; gay; gender; medicine; std; activism; 1980s; epidemic; aids epidemic; NYC; New York City; Greenwich Village; pandemic; Covid-19; sociology

eBook

Published: October 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781978835115