ABSTRACT
‘AIDS,’ the historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg proposes, ‘remains for us one of the ways in which society has always framed illness, finding reasons to exempt and reassure in its agreed upon etiologies. But it remains for us as well that biological mechanisms define and constrain social responses. Ironically this new disease reflects both elements—the biological and the cultural—in a particularly stark form. (…) When certain immunologists suggest that the predispositions for AIDS may grow out from successive onslaughts on the immune system—this may or may not prove to be an accurate description on the natural world. But to many ordinary Americans (and perhaps to a good many medical scientists as well), the meaning lies in another frame of reference. As in cholera a century and half before, the emphasis on repeated infections explains how an individual has predisposed him or herself. The meaning lies in behavior uncontrolled’ (Rosenberg, 1986, p. 51–52). This is undoubtedly true. Scientific knowledge is expressed in an ordinary language, and is laden with cultural and moral undertones. But is the meaning of the affirmation that individuals may have a self inflicted or inborn ‘predisposition’ to AIDS limited to the moral connotations of ‘lack of control’ implied in this term? What about its scientific connotations? Rosenberg suggests that diseases can be seen as ‘occupying points along a spectrum, ranging from those most firmly based in a verifiable pathological mechanism to those, like hysteria and alcoholism with no well understood mechanism, but with a highly charged social profile’, and that AIDS occupies a place on both ends of the spectrum (Rosenberg, 1986, p. 53). This paper attempts to bring together the ‘two ends of the spectrum’, and to examine the ways ‘verifiable pathological mechanism’, verifiable, that is, through specific techniques used by scientists, are carrying societal and cultural values. The symbolic dimensions of AIDS are present not only in the interpretations of this disease by lay persons, but they are embedded within scientific discourses and practices. The ‘meaning of scientific knowledge’ cannot be dissociated from the history of the production of this knowledge.
