A decade ago, in a graduate seminar on “problems” in the history of medicine, my classmates and I began noticing something we came to call “the AIDS epilogue.” A great many books by historians of public health and medicine, it seemed, ended by invoking a condition that had not previously received much focus in their pages: HIV/AIDS. A pathbreaking book on the spread of germ theory in the early 1900s, for instance, concluded with a discussion of how AIDS “has exposed the worst aspects of our