Joseph Sonnabend, Early Force in Fight Against AIDS, Dies at 88
At the epicenter of the epidemic in New York City, he was a pioneer researcher who, as a clinician, also made house calls.
Dr. Joseph Sonnabend in 2014. As both a physician and a researcher, he was one of the most important figures in the fight against AIDS, if also one of the most unheralded.Credit...Simon Watney
Published Jan. 30, 2021Updated Feb. 1, 2021
When he was growing up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the 1930s and ’40s, Joseph Sonnabend would watch his mother, a physician, make house calls in the middle of the night and talk with patients on the phone at all hours. He didn’t want to follow that path, but he did study medicine and become a medical researcher, working alongside Nobel laureates in England on virology and immunology.