Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS

Disease and Democracy is the first comparative analysis of how Western democratic nations have coped with AIDS. Peter Baldwin’s exploration of divergent approaches to the epidemic in the United States and several European nations is a springboard for a wide-ranging and sophisticated historical analysis of public health practices and policies. In addition to his comprehensive presentation of information on approaches to AIDS, Baldwin’s authoritative book provides a new perspective on our most enduring political dilemma: how to reconcile individual liberty with the safety of the community.

Baldwin finds that Western democratic nations have adopted much more varied approaches to AIDS than is commonly recognized. He situates the range of responses to AIDS within the span of past attempts to control contagious disease and discovers the crucial role that history has played in developing these various approaches. Baldwin finds that the various tactics adopted to fight AIDS have sprung largely from those adopted against the classic epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century—especially cholera—and that they reflect the long institutional memories embodied in public health institutions.

Reviews

“Few volumes in this large scholarly literature come close to matching the detail and the sophistication of Peter Baldwin’s remarkable study. . . . Through a highly nuanced comparative analysis of the ways in which a range of different Western democracies have sought to respond to the epidemic, Baldwin’s study provides not only the most extensive record of the ways in which the United States and a number of Western European nations have addressed HIV and AIDS, but also a far-reaching understanding of the different approaches that these countries have developed . . . It is extremely detailed and well documented, with vast references to the academic literature on the issues that it examines.”—Nature Medicine

“This stylishly written and immensely well-informed book is the first really serious attempt to write the contemporary comparative history of AIDS. It should be required reading for anybody already concerned with AIDS or the politics of public health and is a stimulating contribution to broader debates about institutional change and social policy in the modern state.”—Scott L. Greer, Political Studies Review