AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease

In the summer of 1986, Newsweek published a cover story on Gerald Friedland of Montefiore Medical Center. Written in the informal and personal style of the new journalism, Doctor is an example of the attempt by the mainstream media to alter the dominant image of the AIDS patient.' The opening sentence of the essay sets not only its tone but its agenda: One day in April 1985, Dr. Gerald H. Friedland found himself the bedside of a young woman named Maria, letting her know as gently as he could that she was going to die. Disregarding the self-conscious echo of the opening of Dante's Inferno, we can read in this sentence a clear desire to shift the image of the person with from that of the gay man to that of the heterosexual woman. The authors introduce us to an exemplary person with (PWA) who is nevertheless both a woman and a medical anomaly: Nothing in her medical history marked her as a candidate for AIDS, not first glance. She should have been a noncombatant in the AIDS invasion of North America, since she was not one of the 4-H's -homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs, and Haitians the four groups labeled as being at risk through the early '80s.2 Maria was an incidental victim, infected by her former husband, an IV drug user, who had subsequently died of AIDS. The Newsweek cover story both reflects and works to shape the public image of the person with AIDS, an image that has been constructed by the media over the past several years in ways that are contradictory and confusing.3 It is vital that