Although there are more recent videos on the subject of AIDS, this videotaped overview of the highlights of a one-day seminar put on by the Maine Humanities Council, takes a different approach to the subject. Noted writer and critic Susan Sontag, David Herlihy (Professor of History, Brown University), Allan Brandt (Professor of Medicine & Science, Harvard University), and Tom Driver (Professor of Theology & Culture, Union Theological Seminary) are among the lecturers who look at the ethical, historical, and cultural aspects of the AIDS syndrome. Herlihy's comparison of the persecution of the Jewish people, as well as the poverty-ridden, during the Bubonic Plague (or Black Death, which decimated Europe during the 14th century) to the social derision and fear aimed towards homosexuals today, is an especially revealing one-saying much about human nature, in general, and history's tendency to repeat itself (regardless of one's liberal beliefs in that intangible we call "progress"), in particular. Equally enlightening are Allan Brandt's dissection of the myths surrounding the transmission of venereal disease (reaching their apex in the Navy's removal of doorknobs from their vessel's doors during WWI), and John Arras' (Professor of Bioethics, Montefiore Medical Center) comments on tuberculosis, and the willingness of doctors, then, to treat a disease which was much easier to contract than AIDS. This is a penetrating and knowledgeable look at what Susan Sontag lamentably refers to as our "moralization of the disease." Recommended. (Available from: Maine Humanities Council, P.O. Box 7202, Portland, ME 04112.)
AIDS: Plague, Panic, And The Test Of Human Values
(1987) 30 m. $50. Maine Humanities Council. Public performance rights included. Vol. 4, Issue 4
AIDS: Plague, Panic, And The Test Of Human Values
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