ABSTRACT
The Aids panic that took off in the late 1980s and surged through the 1990s was the greatest health-related scare of our time. It had a profound effect on society and accelerated changes in the relationships between the state and the individual, and between doctor and patient, that had been proceeding more gradually over the previous decade. A phenomenon of much wider significance than the novel viral infection on which it was based, the panic was both a product of the peculiar insecurities of the historical moment in which it emerged and a force which intensified them. While the panic provoked private fears of a deadly disease, it also fostered new institutions embodying new forms of solidarity and promoted, in the form of the safe sex code, a new moral framework. It encouraged an already growing preoccupation with health or, to be more precise, with disease. The contemporary obsession with illness and death, with morbidity and mortality, so powerfully reinforced by the Aids crisis, increased the dependence of patient on doctor and strengthened the authority of the state over the individual.
