(“The Photo That Changed the Face of AIDS” — Click here for full-sized image & story)
World AIDS Day was yesterday; today I got this note from commentor JCT:
Life re-ran this commentary/gallery yesterday in honor of AIDS awareness day and it is one of the most stunning examples of the power of photojournalism ever. I saw the original article when I was a medical student (it was discussed all over the hospital as I went to school in NYC) and over 20 years later it still takes my breath away.
Two years later I was an intern in a Manhattan medical center where we served a very large catchment that was being devastated by HIV/AIDS. People forget what it was like before the true drug cocktail approaches and we were still trying to figure out how to use protease inhibitors. At my hospital there was a large HIV/AIDS ward, though the inpatients virtually all had full-blown AIDS by then. They were always trying to figure out how to staff that ward because it was so harrowing and I was part of an “experiment” where we didn’t have overnight call but instead had extended duty hours. It was basically like living on that floor for a month. I can barely describe the experience. Suffice it to say, by then most of the patients were women in their late 20’s-early 30’s because the men were all dead. At least one patient per day died and every death created orphans. I can still remember those rooms with patients who all looked just like David Kirby, crying children and stricken mothers who now had to raise the children. Or worse, the patients who had been abandoned by their families and were alone. By the end of the month I was changed forever. It was so difficult the administration halted the staffing because it was so hard on the interns. In retrospect, I feel lucky for the experience and I am a better doctor because of it.
It’s over 20 years later and I can still remember many of the faces of the patients there and that Life gallery brought it all back. I still remember one of the only times in my adult life that I had a raised voice argument with another person – a quiet homophobe who intimated that these patients “deserved” what happened to them. People still believe that crap today, but back then it was rampant.
In any case, this is something that everyone should see and remember.