Plague Doctors: Responding to the AIDS Epidemic in France and America

(Hardback)

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Plague Doctors highlights culturally based differences between French and American medicine, not only in health care delivery, but in the way each system constructs the interaction between disease and the human body. This work challenges the assumption that biomedicine is uniform across the western world. The author, a medical doctor and anthropologist, provides an ethnographic look into the daily experiences of physicians and researchers, examining how members of the French and American medical communities construct their models of AIDS through discourse and practice. The book is based on a comparative study of two AIDS clinics, one in Chicago and the other in Paris. Participant observation conducted at the clinics and interviews with physicians and researchers outside the sites yielded important insights into the world of AIDS medicine.

Reviews

How the medical community defines and responds to differences between AIDS and other diseases lies at the heart of this volume...This book's primary aim is to develop an understanding of AIDS and the medical community in situ, rather than isolated from its social, historical, or political contexts while contributing to an anthropological understanding of the biomedical world.-Choice
This research-based scholarly book is essential reading for a wide range of persons. The medical specialist and the internist, nurse and public health professional, researcher and international health analyst, the pharmacist and student, as well as educated AIDS patients will find in it new perspectives and valuable information. The work makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of AIDS and of ourselves as well.-Doody's Health Sciences Book Review Journal
"How the medical community defines and responds to differences between AIDS and other diseases lies at the heart of this volume...This book's primary aim is to develop an understanding of AIDS and the medical community in situ, rather than isolated from its social, historical, or political contexts while contributing to an anthropological understanding of the biomedical world."-Choice
"This research-based scholarly book is essential reading for a wide range of persons. The medical specialist and the internist, nurse and public health professional, researcher and international health analyst, the pharmacist and student, as well as educated AIDS patients will find in it new perspectives and valuable information. The work makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of AIDS and of ourselves as well."-Doody's Health Sciences Book Review Journal

Author Bio

JAMIE L. FELDMAN has a doctorate in anthropology and is a resident physician in Family Practice at Lutheran General Hospital in Illinois. She has published on the Gallo-Montagnier dispute over HIV and is currently researching patient models of AIDS/HIV. Her other publications have examined biomedicine from a cross-cultural point of view.