Following the eradication of smallpox, the miracle of antibiotics, and the development of fields like molecular biology, virology, and genetics, scientific medicine was ascendent in the late twentieth century. It seemed that the optimism of the twentieth century had at last come to its fruition, and that for any disease there could be a cure, or so it seemed. And yet, biomedicine did not yield medical utopia — the emergence of HIV/AIDS at the turn of the millennium exposed not only the persistence of epidemic disease, and power of science for understanding novel pathogens, but also the persistently, profoundly political nature of disease in the age of biomedicine.

Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago. He teaches about medicine, disease, and society from the 1500s to the present. His research focuses on the historical metaphysics of the body: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their bodily selves and those of others. He is the author of The Republic of Colour: Science, Perception and the Making of Modern America, which deals with; color theory, politics, and aesthetics at the turn of the century. His newest project examines ways in which linguistics, physiology, and philosophy came together to make new forms of medicine in the twentieth century. He has written for the London Review of Books, Isis, and Cabinet, among other publications.