Selma Dritz

Those interested in the twists and turns in the story of AIDS will have noted the death last month of a central figure – the infectious disease epidemiologist Selma Dritz. She will be remembered not just for her professional expertise but for her compassion for those afflicted.
And interestingly for historians she used the techniques first devised by John Snow in the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak to map how this new infection was being spread in the early 1980’s. Dritz was instrumental in the public health campaign aimed at closing the San Francisco bathhouses and this is pertinent as we are currently digitising many of those early US campaign posters as part of our programme to digitize our collection of 3,000 AIDS posters.