The impact of AIDS cannot be adequately measured by epidemiology alone. As the editors of this volume argue, AIDS must be understood as a 'disease of society', which is challenging and changing society profoundly. Numerous books on AIDS have looked at the ways in which our social institutions, norms and values have determined how the disease has been dealt with, but this book, first published in 1991, examines the ways in which AIDS is, in turn, changing our social institutions, norms and values. It explores the impact of AIDS on the arts and popular entertainment, on our concept of family, on government and legal institutions and on the health services, and the ways in which AIDS is forcing society to come to terms with longstanding tensions between community values and individual rights.

‘This book powerfully illuminates the way in which AIDS has shifted our perceptions of contemporary issues, from our attitudes to risk, sex and the family to the role of the nursing profession and the rights of prisoners. Although the material is based on the American experience, it is essential reading for anyone who wants to know about the likely intellectual agenda of tomorrow in other countries: on the evidence of these essays, the United States is ahead of us not only in the scale of the tragedy, but in the sophistication applied to its analysis.’

Rudolph Klein - University of Bath