"This poignant and eloquent book is a memoir of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in the Bronx, a physician's firsthand account of the emergence of an epidemic and the lives that it touched. It is also an exploration of how the physician was himself transformed by his experience with these patients." "Dr. Peter Selwyn, now a well-known researcher and clinician in the area of HIV and drug abuse, came to Monteflore Medical Center in the Bronx as a medical intern in June 1981. He remained there for ten years, caring for patients with AIDS. During that same decade he got married and became a father. Absorbed in the pain and losses of his patients and their families, Dr. Selwyn finally acknowledged the grief he had carried for decades following the sudden death (and apparent suicide) of his father when the author was an infant. He realized that, like AIDS, suicide stigmatizes both those who die and those who survive - an insight that helped him to see the connections between his patients' lives and his own. Surrounded by dying young parents, he understood what it meant to have a father and to be one. The insight began a process of personal healing in the midst of the epidemic. His story can help us see AIDS (and any life-threatening illness) as an opportunity to go through our own fear, pain, and darkness and to come out on the other side."--Jacket.