Joseph Sonnabend: the first AIDS doctor

Early life and career

He was born in Johannesburg when racial discrimination had not yet been codified into the laws of apartheid (1948), and grew up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where his mother was a physician and his father a university professor of psychology and sociology. He returned to Johannesburg for education at the University of the Witwatersrand (1956), then on to the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh (1961), where he trained in infectious diseases.

Sonnabend pursued research rather than clinical care, working at the National Institute of Medical Research in the laboratory of Alick Isaacs, the co-discoverer of interferon. Isaacs’s unexpected death from a brain haemorrhage at age 45 probably contributed to Sonnabend’s decision to accept a research position at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and move to New York City in 1969. The city was at its gritty nadir; homosexual activity was still illegal and discrimination rampant. But the Stonewall riots that year marked the start of a modern gay era and drew many young men who wished to live as …