Field Guide To Falling Ill Essays – Jonathan Gleason

The exact metaphor Sonnabend used was a pool: if only a few people are jumping in and contaminating the water maybe a few will get sick, but if more people join and the water becomes saturated suddenly many people will begin to fall ill. In the decades since the AIDS crisis began, the new agent theory has been confirmed again and again, but in the disorienting years of the early epidemic, Sonnabend’s multifactorial model was neither unbelievable nor ridiculed.

The incubation period of AIDS is long and irregular, making it hard to detect through the background static of disease, especially when only a small number of cases are distributed across a large population. And from the way AIDS emerged, dim and mysterious, as if out of a fog, it made intuitive sense that it was the result of a gradual buildup of damage over time.

Susan Sontag, for one, was interested in Sonnabend’s model, though she was not entirely convinced. In a 1986 letter she wrote, “Your argument that AIDS is a multi-factorial situation is—to a lay person—persuasive, certainly when I think of how the disease seems to be spreading among gay men. But how would you then account for the fact that some have gotten AIDS from a transfusion of contaminated blood?”29 Others were more enthusiastic about Sonnabend’s proposal.

Stuart F. Schlossman, a professor of medicine at Harvard, wrote in 1983: “I had the chance to read your paper entitled ‘A Multifactorial Model for the Development of AIDS in Homosexual Men’ and found it to be first-rate and of considerable interest.”30 After the publication of How to Have Sex in a Pandemic, Callen began calling himself an “inventor” of safe sex—a questionable but useful hyperbole.

He encouraged Sonnabend to do the same. Safe sex may not have been invented as much as prescribed or discovered, but How to Have Sex was the first systematic attempt to prevent the spread of AIDS by adjusting sexual practices. For such an early document, I am struck by how effective the recommendations are. Despite its flawed theory, in its broader contours, the recommendations are almost entirely correct. Sonnabend and his coauthors categorized “getting fucked” without the use of a condom as one of the highest-risk sexual activities, while “fisting, though generally a risky activity, to be very low risk in terms of contracting AIDS.”

Part of the success of Sonnabend’s theory is that his multifactorial model theorized a virus as the cause of AIDS, just not the right one. He believed condom use, rather than limiting the number of partners one had, would limit exposure, and therefore prevent AIDS. It was an incorrect theory, but it mapped closely enough to reality as to be useful.

Essays by Jonathan Gleason Foreword by MEGHAN O’ROURKE The Yale Nonfiction Book Prize THE YALE REVIEW OceanofPDF.com Published in collaboration with The Yale Review. Copyright © 2026 by Jonathan Gleason. Foreword copyright © 2026 by Meghan O’Rourke. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Yale New and Tablet Gothic type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2025941394 ISBN 978-0-300-28294-8 (hardcover) Epigraph: Mark Doty, excerpt from “Charlie Howard’s Descent,” in Fire to Fire (Copyright © 2008 by Mark Doty; used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Authorized Representative in the EU: Easy Access System Europe, Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected] 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 OceanofPDF.com For my family, by blood and otherwise OceanofPDF.com he is beautiful and like any good diver has only an edge of fear he transforms into grace. —Mark Doty, “Charlie Howard’s Descent” OceanofPDF.com Contents Foreword by Meghan O’Rourke Inheritance Blood in the Water Field Guide to Falling Ill Circulations A Difficult Man Exit Wounds Bitter Joy Gilead Proxemics No Harm Notes Acknowledgments Index OceanofPDF.com Foreword A young man in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, in a Western country that prides itself on technological prowess, discovers he is living inside an imperiled body.

Specifically, the young man lives in the United States, with its uneasy combination of cutting-edge medical interventions and fragmented, often inequitable healthcare. He is a writer— an essayist drawn not only to description but to reflection, to the doubling back and self-correction that the form demands. He is also, as it happens, a person repeatedly drawn into encounters with illness and biomedicine, whether in his own body or those of others. This duality is the terrain of Jonathan Gleason’s Field Guide to Falling Ill, a collection of essays that explores what he calls the “scenarios …

situated halfway between medical emergency and human volatility.” Gleason’s work, at its core, is an exploration of those moments when our bodies—home to our intimate, private selves—collide with the impersonal machinery of corporatized biomedicine and the sociocultural narratives that shape it. It is also a meditation on language and the ways experience is mediated (and sometimes misshaped) by the words available to describe it.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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