Grand rounds: one hundred years of internal medicine

Grmek is admirably receptive to the socio-cultural shaping of responses to epidemic disease. Pointing out the irony of the fact that Susan Sontag's Illness as metaphor (1979) appeared on the very brink of the emergence of AIDS, he draws upon her perception that every age gets the symbolic disease it deserves to explore the metaphorical freighting of AIDS. Clearly aware that the ban upon figurative language called for by Miss Sontag in her AIDS and its metaphors (1988) flies in the face of all history, Grmek shows how the traditional metaphors surrounding epidemics have been conscripted both to fight the spread of the infection as well as to stigmatize sufferers. Not least, the historian cannot be hors de combat. Unashamedly using the language of "la lutte contre cette maladie", Grmek shows in a superb concluding chapter (aptly titled 'Grandeurs et Miseres de la Medecine Moderne') that the AIDS epidemic is the creation of a modern world, another of whose creations-scientific medicine-offers us our only hope of conquering it.