Plague years : a doctor's journey through the AIDS crisis / Ross A. Slotten.

"In his gripping memoir, Ross Slotten-one of the earliest doctors to treat AIDS in Chicago-documents how Chicago's gay communities were decimated by confusion, fear, and ultimately despair over the ravaging disease. This tragedy was especially painful for Slotten who, as a gay man himself, treated-and buried-scores of acquaintances, friends, and lovers. Limning powerful portraits of the period, the hospitals, and the community, Slotten is unsentimental about the environment, the brutal treatments, the ghastly suffering, the deaths, and his own uncertainties and fears. He further reminds us that AIDS, while today more easily managed, could all too easily resurge. Slotten's book is both a timely policy warning and a devastating portrait of how a community, a hospital, and a city faced a health crisis of seemingly unmanageable proportions"-- Provided by publisher.