A pioneer in AIDS research, treatment
Joseph Sonnabend opened his medical practice in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of New York City in 1977, on the cusp of what would become one of the most consequential battles of modern medicine. At the time, what is now known as AIDS — acquired immunodeficiency syndrome — had not yet been identified, and scientists were years away from isolating HIV as its cause.
“Fate,” Dr. Sonnabend once said to Buzzfeed, “put me at the beginning of this epidemic.”
He was a gay physician who treated predominantly gay men at a time when they were often regarded as outcasts. Receiving his patients after they looked in vain for compassionate care elsewhere, he became one of the first physicians to recognize the emergence of AIDS and went on to play a critical, if at times controversial, role in slowing its spread.
“He was very devoted to the clientele” at a time when “there was still a lot of prejudice, bias, hostility to people who were gay,” Robert Gallo, an American virologist who is credited as a co-discoverer of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), said.
Sonnabend died Jan. 24 at a hospital in London, where he had lived since 2005. He was 88. The cause was complications of a heart attack he had suffered three weeks earlier, said David Kirschenbaum, a friend and co-executor of his estate.
Born in South Africa and trained in England, Sonnabend brought to his practice a background in infectious diseases that helped him understand before many others the nature of the illness.
“I was seeing kinds of morbidity amongst sexually active young gay men that could not be adequately accounted for,” he said in 2000 when he received an honour from amfar, a research organization that he helped found in 1983 as the AIDS Medical Foundation.
In the early days, and later, Sonnabend at times found himself at odds with the medical establishment, which he said dismissed him as “just a VD doctor” (“VD” refers to venereal, or sexually transmitted, disease).
But there were also profound, meaningful successes.
Sean Strub, the founder of POZ, described himself as “one of the dying” people Sonnabend had kept alive.
“Not through some magic combination of pills he urged me to take,” Strub wrote, “but through an intangible conveyance of hope, respect (and) trust.”