Robert, AIDS, and Infectious Sympathy: I Remember When There Was Nothing Medicine Could Do

written about these books in my dissertation, in part because they enthralled me with their uncanny gothic techniques, triggering the sensations of embodied narrative.Brown had personal experience with yellow fever: He lived through the epidemic in New York City in 1798, when he and his roommate, Elihu Smith, a cherished friend, contracted the disease.Brown tenderly nursed his friend before Smith died of yellow fever.Brown then began to write about epidemics, turning to the story of the outbreak that had devastated Philadelphia years earlier, in 1793.He made it central to his fiction and philosophy by exploring the phenomenon of contagion itself.Brown described friendships that sprang up between attractive and "discerning" young men, friendships that were then fractured by diseases and other maladies, where sadness and melancholy could blossom into a life-threatening illness.The 1793 yellow fever epidemic caused horrible deaths, and fear of infection drove people to monstrous behavior.Brown's novels describe how civic leaders and wealthy residents fled the city, leaving the sick and vulnerable to fend for themselves: "Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents. . . .Men were seized by this disease in the streets . . .they perished in the public ways. . . .The chambers of disease were deserted, and the sick left to die of negligence.None could be found to remove the lifeless bodies." 1 Brown absorbed the social and cultural vectors of disease into the nervous system of his narratives.His culture believed that diseases