The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present

A gay man who spent the early years of the AIDS epidemic pursuing a graduate degree in comparative literature--and watching his ex-lover die--Allen has written an engaging contribution to the field of AIDS scholarship. The author (who, after teaching literature at Princeton and USC, is now getting an MBA in health care management at Wharton) traces the history of Western ideas concerning the links between what they saw as sin, sickness and death from the medieval era onward. In the Middle Ages, he observes, diseases such as leprosy, syphilis and bubonic plague--each of which gets a chapter--were seen as God's punishment for sinners; physicians were torn between their duties as healers and their duties as Christians not to obstruct divine justice by aiding the sufferers. This conflict persisted but, according to Allen, took a strange turn after about 1700, when doctors began to believe that one particular sexual practice--masturbation--brought down a righteous medical vengeance upon those who practiced it. Allen looks at how the remnants of these ideas about sex, disease, sin and death have shaped the more recent debates about illness--especially AIDS. He details the public health conflict between those who want to halt the spread of the disease and those who want to see divine justice visited on homosexuals and drug users, praising folks such as the former Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop Alternately thoughtful, passionate and political, Allen has produced a stimulating work on a sensitive topic. (June)