Joseph Sonnabend, pioneering AIDS physician, dies at 88
Emily Langer, The Washington Post
Jan. 27, 2021
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A 1993 photo of Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, left, with patients Michael Callen, center, and Richard Berkowitz, who became AIDS activists and co-wrote the manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach. Photo courtesy of Richard Dworkin
Joseph Sonnabend opened his medical practice in the Greenwich Village neighborhood 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.
As a doctor treating gay men in New York City, he became one of the first physicians to recognize the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s.
Pioneering South African AIDS researcher Joseph Sonnabend dies at 88
(Photo Credit: Simon Watney, Kent, UK via Facebook)
LONDON, UK – Pioneering AIDS researcher and clinician Joseph Sonnabend, 88, died January 24, 2021 at London’s famed Wellington Hospital after suffering a heart attack on January 3, 2021.
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a physician mother and university professor father, Joseph Adolph Sonnabend grew up in Bulawayo, in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He trained in infectious diseases at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh.
In the 1960s, Sonnabend worked in London under Alick Isaacs, the co-discoverer of interferon, at the National Institute of Medical Research. In the early 1970s, he moved to New York City to continue interferon research as associate professor at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Sonnabend later served as Director of Continuing Medical Education at the B