Medicine & Health

Public health expert Ronald Bayer says that the AIDS epidemic is forcing medical professionals to rethink issues of privacy and mandatory screening. Complicating the matter is the fact that the disease disproportionately affects vulnerable communities like homosexuals, people of color, and intravenous drug users. Bayer says one of best ways to deal with AIDS is to change the sexual climate of the country, wherein individuals become more forthright about communication and protection.

Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg links the eating disorder to Victorian standards of femininity and contemporary ideas of health and beauty. Her findings suggest that increased social mobility put women and girls at greater risk for the disease.

Susan Baur, author of Hypochondria: Woeful Imaginings, a book that examines how hypochondria develops, how hypochondriacs stay that way, and how they have been viewed over time.

Drs. William Masters, Virginia Johnson and Robert Kolodny discuss their controversial book Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS. They argue in the book that the risk to the heterosexual population posed by the AIDS virus has been dramatically understated. Drs. Masters and Johnson are best-known for their work on sexuality, particularly the book Human Sexual Response. Also, a seven-minute interview with Nancy Padian, who is directing a California study into the transmission of AIDS in heterosexual couples.

Charles Rosenberg. He's written a book on the history of American hospitals titled The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System. Rosenberg is a professor in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his new memoir, The Body Silent, anthropologist Robert Francis Murphy explores his experiences as a quadriplegic, a condition brought on by a spinal tumor.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton researches the psychological effects of wartime atrocities on both survivors and those who committed crimes against humanity.

R. D. Laing is a psychiatrist who challenged conventional views in the 1960s with his proposal that schizophrenia was an adaptive behavior, "a sane response to an insane world," as opposed to an illness. The counterculture embraced Laing's views, but they were controversial in academic circles. In 1965, Laing formed the Philadelphia (for brotherly love, not the city) Association, an alternative treatment center for schizophrenics.

Writer Germaine Greer is suspicious of both the safety and sexually liberating power of birth control. In her new book, she suggests women look beyond intercourse and seek different social, emotional and physical paths toward sexual pleasure.

As a member of the Public Citizen Health Research Group, Dr. Sidney Wolfe cowrote a book which looks at the safety and efficacy of brand-name and generic over-the-counter drugs. He answers questions from Fresh Air listeners.