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Advances in Medical Sociology. Volume 3: The Social and Behavioral Aspects of AIDS, edited by Gary L. Albrecht and Rick S. Zimmerman. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993. 227 pp. NPL cloth. ISBN: 1-55938-439-5.
Private Choices and Public Health: The AIDS Epidemic in an Economic Perspective, by Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. 264 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-674-70738-9.
"AIDS is a social disease." "AIDS is the major cause of death among young men in the United States." "AIDS is the world's number-one public health problem." These clichs appear to be largely backed up by fact, even though there are some over- (and under-) estimates of the epidemiological course of the disease and its modes of transmission. Individual, group, institutional, societal, and inter-societal responses to the disease have varied, and no doubt will continue to do so as risks (perceived and real) change. Unlike most problems of this magnitude, societies and governments have clearly acknowledged that the most viable solutions (although there are debates over what these are) are social, rather than technological or biomedical. The number and breadth of the AIDS-related issues to which sociology could contribute are endless, spanning nearly all traditional dimensions of the discipline from applied to theoretical, from macro to micro. Clearly, one would expect that medical sociology would lead the "contribution charge," closely followed by other traditional specialties, ranging from demography through family, political, and organizations to deviance, prejudice, gender, and social movements.
What is surprising is that the discipline's contributions are difficult to gauge. Although a network exists among sociologists interested in AIDS-related topics, this network remains largely informal. No department (of which I am aware) has developed a specialty in the Sociology of AIDS (nor am I necessarily advocating this). Most telling, though, is that our discipline's leading professional journals are totally devoid of research reports explicitly dealing with the topic. For example, there has not been a single article in either the American Sociological Review or the American Journal of Sociology devoted to out discipline's "interest" in an AIDS-related topic; and The Journal of Health and Social Behavior, our professional association's official journal for health and medical topics, averaged one paper a year on AIDS from 1987 through 1991, had...