• AIDS
• HIV
• herpes
• social science
• syphilis

For this issue, I was asked to investigate the history of stigma in relation to herpes, syphilis and HIV using the journal's own archive as my main source, while also attempting to put its content on the subject into a wider social context. I am trained as a social historian, specialising in Russian and Yugoslav history, so it was an exciting challenge to look into issues and subjects quite divergent from what I studied at university. I will share some of my thoughts into what the archive told me based on my experience of other archives I used for university work.

The list of articles used is not intended to be exhaustive; I have highlighted those that contribute to the understanding of stigma towards the diseases and would encourage you to read them in full, as an extract can only give a small part of a large picture. There are many scientific studies within the archive, but many of these do not contribute directly to the understanding of it.

The journal is generally written by an academic community, mainly with strong scientific knowledge as the basis for their articles. This means that outside and political viewpoints are not often reported, other than in a few isolated cases. Therefore, it is interesting to view how the more closeted community of the journal views each topic. As a social historian, it is strange to read articles that seem to lack an explicit explanation of the socio-political context in which they were conceived. If we compare a scientific study of a vaccine to local history, its easiest reflection, a history of a town or village far away from the centres of power would note the larger issues that surrounded its development in terms of national and/or international politics.i The scientific studies, however, lack this.

As time passes, it is noticeable that the scope of the journal moves from being focused on Britain, with some reference to what were colonies at that point, to having a wider international reach, somewhat reflecting the interwar view that Britain was the centre of the world. This can be seen in the dominance of articles describing Britain in the articles about syphilis and herpes moving to the more international scope of articles focusing on HIV/AIDS. The era each article reflects contributes heavily to this, with the fact that the articles on AIDS are dealing with issues from the 1980s onwards, meaning that there is a much wider scope of articles from around the world to use. Indeed, the journal's wider reporting somewhat reflects globalisation within the last 20 years. The spread of internet communication is something that cannot be ignored by any academic field.

It is also notable that studies explicitly addressing social aspects of venereal diseases have become more prevalent after the discovery of AIDS. This has an interesting parallel in the study of history itself, with the period after the 1960s seeing a more bottom–up approach to the subject,1 ii a history of the people rather than of the ruling elite, undoubtedly influenced by the prevalence of Marxism in academia at the time. This is somewhat mirrored in this journal's growing use of social studies in addition to ‘pure’ science, which is a more top–down approach.

Interestingly, many articles from the earlier journal have abstracts in French in addition to English, something which ends in 1975.

Why then take a social approach to understanding venereal diseases? If one restricts oneself to purely studying venereal diseases in clinical terms then the emotional experience for the patients being dealt with is going to be omitted, which is equally important in terms of minimising the impact that venereal disease has on the patients' lives. Studying stigma will also help in the recognition of social problems associated with the disease both in the past and in the present and give both the student and the doctor some ideas to minimise them in the future. The old adage that you cannot understand the present without studying the past certainly applies.

For instance, AIDS awareness was at a high in the 1990s due to concerted government campaigns2 and entertainment and popular interest. However, interest is much lower at present, with the root causes seeming to be lack of government interest when compared with the 1980s and 1990s and the fact that the condition is now able to be dealt with in the West, if not in the developing world. A symbol of the lack of popular interest in AIDS is the fact that the last notable production to deal with the subject, Angels in America (a TV mini-series), was released a full 8 years ago and the one before that was Philadelphia, which although acquired critical fame and received Oscars, was released in 1993. Both deal with AIDS in the 1980s in the USA, rather than offering a new perspective. Nevertheless, the recent film Africa United—in which one of the main characters, an African boy, dies of the disease—does deal with the subject head-on, made more remarkable by the fact that the film has a European director. Yet, the audience figures for this film are incomparable to the star-studded American features mentioned; Philadelphia took $206 678 4403 compared with Africa United's £545 556.4

AIDS has become a rather ethnocentric issue since the millennium, in the sense that because it is not seen to affect the West as it once did, it is not as widely reported as it was. This is despite the fact that on a worldwide basis, the epidemic is still a huge public health problem. What was once a major story for all media has essentially been sidelined in the last 10 years compared with the coverage in the 1980s and 1990s. Learning how to keep interest in venereal disease high among the general population when the problems accruing seem to be diminishing is certainly something to which there is currently no obvious solution. As I have been writing this piece, it seems that a possible vaccine for HIV/AIDS has been found,5 which if proven will bring great benefits to Western medicine, but will make this challenge even harder.