ABSTRACT
AIDS, so one policy analyst has argued, may be the ‘first media disease’ (Street, 1988). But AIDS is by no means the first disease to have a strong media component in its construction and presentation. Historically, disease has long been mediated by its presentation in the press. Cholera, for example, was a key disease in terms of press attention (Morris, 1976). Other diseases killed more widely but few attracted such a range of coverage-from religious periodicals and medical journals, from radical newspapers and magazines on household management; from the educational and temperance press and the literary and scientific papers. The sheer amount of press and periodical focus on the disease helped stimulate a general sense of fear and dread. More recently the media presentation of disease as, for example, in the post-World War I flu epidemic, or the polio epidemic in the 1950s, has been significant in helping structure public responses (Crosby, 1976; Paul, 1971).
