67 pages • 2 hours read
Randy ShiltsAnd The Band Played On
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Rock Hudson's death gave the Western world insight into AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, when he "riveted America's attention upon this deadly new threat for the first time, and his diagnosis became a demarcation that would separate the history of America before AIDS from the history that came after" (xxi). However, by the time people were aware of the AIDS epidemic, many lives had been lost, and on the day of Hudson's death, "some 12,000 Americans were already dead or dying of AIDS and hundreds of thousands more were infected with the virus that caused the disease" (xxi-xxii).
Victims, especially those from the gay communities, were affected by the perception that AIDS was a “homosexual affliction” (xxii). This resulted in a lack of funding, awareness, concern, and action on behalf of the Reagan Administration, political leaders, public health officials, and scientists, with none more disappointing than the media: “Without the media to fulfill its role as public guardian, everyone else was left to deal—and not deal—with AIDS as they saw fit” (xxiii). Those few that chose to fight and persist became the heroes of “a tale of courage as well as cowardice, compassion as well as bigotry, inspiration as well as venality, and redemption as well as despair,” one narrated “so that it will never happen again, to any people, anywhere” (xxiii).
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Feast of the Hearts”
On July 4, 1976, New York City hosted the grand celebration of “America’s 200th birthday party” in New York Harbor, where fireworks were displayed throughout the night and “[s]hips from fifty-five nations had poured sailors into Manhattan to join the throngs, counted in the millions” (3).
The same year, in Kinshasa, Zaire on Christmas Eve, Dr. Grethe Rask and Dr. Ib Bygbjerg, celebrate Christmas Eve away from their native Denmark. Despite being overcome with unbearable fatigue, Dr. Rask attempts to prepare dinner for her homesick colleague. An experienced surgeon, she preferred the remote village of Abumombazi over a promising career in her homeland because she wanted to be on her own. However, she was cognizant of the conditions of working in a rural setting:
The lack of rudimentary supplies meant that a surgeon’s work had risks that doctors in the developed world could not imagine, particularly because the undeveloped part, specifically Central Africa, seemed to sire new diseases with nightmarish regularity (4).
Dr. Bygberg notices that his friend, who “had always been remarkably healthy, throughout her arduous career” (6) seemed to be losing an extensive amount of weight from “mysterious diarrhea” (5). Her lymph nodes have been swollen for almost two years. In November of the following year, when her condition worsens, Dr. Rask knows her reality, saying, “I’d better go home to die” (6).
Upon testing, the doctors are not able to understand her symptoms, as numerous infections appear without any apparent reason and her immune system is weak. Although she chooses to retire to her cottage to die, Dr. Bygbjerg believes “there must be an answer to the mysteries of her medical charts” (7). Pushing her doctors for help, he begs her to return to Copenhagen. That December, she dies, and her autopsy shows that her “lungs were filled with millions of organisms known as Pneumocystis carinii” (7). Dr. Bygbjerg decides to study the tropical disease that robbed his friend of her life.
Prologue-Part 1 Analysis
In the Prologue and first chapter, Shilts sets the stage for the AIDS epidemic. He starts with the image of death as being the suave, leading-man actor Rock Hudson. It is because of him everyone knew what AIDS meant and that it was not just a disease belonging to a marginalized group. The nation ignored what was touted as a gay disease before Hudson’s death.
In fact, because of these misplaced notions, the crisis was not yet a crisis as it showed the fears prevalent in the society at the time. For instance, because the disease at first appeared in homosexual men, the epidemic didn’t gain the attention that it otherwise would have. Shilts begins Part 1 with an excerpt from Revelation 6:8, from the Bible, which refers to the arrival of the Apocalypse as evidenced by The Four Horseman. The First Horseman is called Pestilence, and refers to disease/plague. At this point, prior to the 1980’s, no one could gauge the extent of the rage that AIDS would unleash.
