Histoire du Sida: début et origine d'une pandémie actuelle

strains of nineteenth-century sectarian science. Although critical of orthodox science in this period, nonetheless they have implicitly drawn a model from late twentieth-century science-as a detached, professionalized undertaking-that was neither feasible nor relevant in this context. Most sectarians were practitioners rather than intellectual system-builders, and many sought fame, fortune and a popular audience. But this hardly stigmatizes them as charlatans, for as historians have recently stressed, scientifically-inclined Americans in the nineteenth century had to be first and foremost practitioners. Even the spiritualist philosopher Davis became a private practitioner (to earn his living), using his clairvoyant powers to heal patients. The essays fall short of explaining these sects' decline, although Wrobel, in an unfortunate phrase, suggests that sectarian sciences "paved the road for the triumphant march" of orthodox science (p. 224). For most of these authors 1890 is a watershed. Yet surely the interest in science popularizers has hardly faded: what of the rise of New Age Medicine, occult groups, and holistic healing? Readers are left to wonder how and why many orthodox scientists came to reject sectarian principles and practices, and how the enduring fringes of science have been defined and maintained. History teaches the present to learn from the past. Historians make bad prophets. These two aphorisms-prima facie contradictory but, rightly juxtaposed, the soul of historiographical wisdom-set the intellectual parameters for Professor Grmek's admirable account of what he felicitously calls "la premiere des pestilences postmodernes". The narrative Grmek tells of the early years of the epidemic in the United States and Western Europe is by-and-large familiar enough to English-speaking audiences, starting with the presentation of mysterious complaints amongst Los Angeles homosexuals in 1979, and going up to the "compromis politique" whereby, since 1987, the rival American and French claims to priority in the discovery of the AIDS virus have been smoothed out (cynics would say because Gallo and Montagnier both recognized that the award of a Nobel Prize would necessarily be joint). On the American experience, Grmek has culled many of his details from Randy Shilts's And the band played on. Politics, people and the AIDS epidemic (1987). Mercifully we are spared Shilts's journalistic colouring, and Grmek spices his text with a mordant Gallic wit-deploring, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon linguistic clumsiness of the acronym AIDS ("les deux consonnes finales ne sont pas euphoniques"). What makes this by far the best historical overview of AIDS to date is, of course, …