Richard McKay, a history doctoral student at the University of Oxford in England, recently spent about three weeks exploring the AIDS archives in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He is working on a dissertation about the emergence of the now mostly discredited concept of a "patient zero" who was a central disseminator of the disease.
(In its most controversial sections, Shilts' book portrayed a French Canadian flight attendant, Gaetan Dugas, as willfully spreading the virus, and McKay is trying to find people who knew Dugas.)
The collections helped bring McKay's research alive.
"A big difficulty in the history of medicine is that records are left mostly by practitioners. It's often very difficult to access the voice of the patient," McKay said. "These archives do a lot for that, to a greater extent than others do."
Among the historical society's holdings are detailed diaries kept by James Ritter of Monterey from 1989 to 1994. In each annual volume, he listed all his friends who died of AIDS that year; there were 20 names in 1994, the year before Ritter died at 35. His red-bound journals show a man who was busy volunteering to help others while trying to keep up his own health and ties to friends and family.
At one point, he writes from his hospital bed about his worries that his cat would miss its flea bath and then muses about his own pain and beliefs: "It's getting harder and harder. . . . Sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel good again. I hope so. Thank you Lord, guard and bless me. Be with me. Amen."
larry.gordon@latimes.com
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AIDS archives
Online summaries of the three AIDS archives are, or soon will be, available at the Online Archive of California at www.oac.cdlib.org.
For more information on the individual archives, contact:
www.onearchives.org or (213) 741-0094
www.glbthistory.org or (415) 777-5455
www.library.ucsf.edu/collres/archives/ or (415) 476-8112
