An excerpt from
Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey Through the AIDS Crisis
By Ross A. Slotten, MD
Narrated by Edison McDaniels
In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history.
Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.
“Plague Years is a remarkable book. At once the story of a disease and a very personal and reflective memoir, 200-some pages written in a powerful narrative style at once artful and enlightening. . . .There are many truths in this stunning and important book. And there’s also hope.” -- Rick Kogan ― Chicago Tribune
“[A] powerful, humane and stylish memoir.” ― Nature
"This medical memoir will be welcomed as a timely and thought-provoking read." ― Choice
“Slotten’s memoir of caring for AIDS patients in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, Plague Years, could not be more timely. . . . San Francisco and New York City have long been cast as the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic, but Slotten provides a history of another major urban center coming to grips with an illness that was unexpected and misunderstood. . . .He is unflinching in examining his own psychology, the mechanisms he erected to protect himself, articulating his sense of deficiency in a bracing confessional tone. . . What loudly echoes from Slotten’s account is the commitment of caregivers to confront the uncertainty of a contagious disease.” -- Jerome Groopman ― The New York Review of Books
