Introduction

Summary

The introduction draws on the history of visualisation in medicine and presents the case of the visual history of AIDS. It provides an overview of existing perspectives and presents the book's contribution as a unique take on the medical visualisation of AIDS as one that is characterised by stringency, a narrowing focus and an increasing abstraction and iconisation of AIDS and later HIV. Furthermore, the central source, the AIDS atlas, is introduced and contextualised in the history of the epidemic and the history of medicine and science. The book is presented as a threefold take on the visual and medical history of AIDS with its chapters dedicated first to photography in clinical medicine, second to geographical and epidemiological mapping and third, to the modelling and visualisation of the virus, HIV.