The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the 19th and 20th centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the 20th century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the 21st century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.

MATTHEW KELLY earned a PhD in sociomedical sciences and an MPH from Columbia University, where he was honored with the Marisa de Castro Benton Award. Prior to that, he graduated from Brown University. He currently is pursuing a medical degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

List of Acronyms
Introduction: Acknowledging the Everyday
Part I: The Soils of Unorthodoxy: Irregular and Alternative Medicine in U.S. History
1 Situating Unorthodox AIDS Activism within the History of Medicine in the United States
2 A Broken Model: Twentieth-Century Transformations in the Social Constructions of Health and Disease
3 A Broken Trust: The Changing Character of Health Care
Part II: The Seeds of Unorthodoxy: The Emergence of Unorthodox AIDS Activism
4 Everyday Unorthodoxies and the People with AIDS Coalition (PWAC)
5 Patient, Heal Thyself: The History of Health Education AIDS Liaison (HEAL)
Conclusion: Listening to and Learning from the Sounds of Furious Living
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index