| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Peter Baldwin. Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS. (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public, number 13.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 465. $44.95.
In this book, Peter Baldwin examines the relevance of the past for understanding how developed countries charted a course to deal with their domestic AIDS crises in the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Denmark, Italy, and other industrialized democracies, he shows that some countries, like the U.S. and Sweden, took relatively authoritarian and interventionist policies to come to grips with the AIDS epidemic, whereas other places, such as Bavaria in Germany or Britain, took more libertarian approaches. Using evidence from an exhaustive survey of published official sources from all countries reviewed, Baldwin explains that these divergent responses to a common disease source can be explained by the development of national policies to combat infectious diseases, especially cholera, tuberculosis, and syphilis, in the nineteenth century.	1
This book is not a comprehensive history of the AIDS epidemic, nor is it a history of science or public health per se. Readers seeking details about the natural history of the virus, the search for a vaccine, or the evolution of social movements centered around raising the political profile of HIV/AIDS will have to look elsewhere. Instead, over a series of ten chapters, Baldwin seeks to persuade the reader of the importance of path dependency with respect to domestic public health policies. The book's thematic organization—rather than chronological or geographical—is intended to support that view.	. . .

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