On this episode, we talk with Dr. Ross Slotten about his memoir, Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis. He covers the time from when he entered family medicine practice just as AIDS was emerging, through the crisis, and the decades since as both a physician and a member of the at-risk community of gay men on the north side of Chicago. We also talk with Dr. Slotten about two other sources covering the early years of the AIDS crisis: a documentary film about the first country’s first AIDS unit at San Francisco General Hospital, and a literary novel about a group of gay men with AIDS or at risk for AIDS in Chicago.
More about Dr. Slotten’s background is here, which includes authorship of the book, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (published by Columbia University Press, 2006).
Sources:
Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis by Ross Slotten, published 2020, University of Chicago Press
5B, directed by Paul Haggis and Dan Krauss, released June 2019
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, published 2019
Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces on episode sources:
Plague Years
5B
The Great Believers
Recommendations (we didn’t have time to talk about):
Rent (play, movie), Jonathan Larson
Angels in America (play, movie), Tony Kushner
Blue (movie), Derek Jarman
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.
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Executive producer: Anne Bentley