| Description | The AIDS Social History Programme collection, comprises of central government, regional government, medical and voluntary organisation material relating to the HIV/AIDS epidemic chiefly within the context of the epidemic in the United Kingdom. The central government papers provide minutes, evaluative reports, press releases, parliamentary session records along with public education campaign material on AIDS between 1985 and 1994; epidemiological and sociological reports on AIDS in the United Kingdom and comparative reports of European AIDS experience along with samples of national public health campaigns in Sweden and Switzerland; AIDS-related voluntary organisations campaign material and academic papers evaluating and surveying the organisation and history of some of these organisations including the Terrence Higgins Trust, Landmark and the Aled Richards Trust; papers relating to national and regional health authorities' strategies and initiatives to prevent HIV transmission from intravenous drug use and published material relating to charities and voluntary organisations established to prevent drug misuse and support HIV-affected individuals.
The current collection is based on some of the original AIDS documentary archive of the Programme and retains the series structure composed by Virginia Berridge and implemented by the Programme’s archivist, Janet Foster. The archives are arranged chiefly by organisation or location and comprise mainly of reports and analysis of strategies and policies covering actions of European countries as well as the UK (by 1993 the research had looked at policies in Poland and Hungary where AIDS amongst intravenous drug users was particularly prevalent), evaluations of UK voluntary sector organisations, and published papers from government departments and academic research bodies. The collection also includes 108 audio cassette recordings of informal interviews with key individuals involved in the history of AIDS in the UK. |
| AdminHistory | The AIDS Social History Programme directed by Virginia Berridge and Philip Strong was based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and funded by the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust. From 1988 to 1994, the programme engaged in researching and writing the social history of AIDS in the UK, concentrating on the formation and implementation of an official AIDS policy and the role and influence of the voluntary and medical sectors on this process. The multi-disciplinary research unit used documentary analysis and informal interviews with key participants recording and analysing the cultural, legal, financial and political dimensions of the epidemic.
A documentary archive was created as part of the programme and the current records in the collection were part of this archive with the remainder having been donated to the Wellcome Library and Manuscript Collection. There were a number of publications from the programme and including: 'AIDS and Contemporary History, ed. Virginia Berridge and Philip Strong, Cambridge University Press, 1993 and 'AIDS in the UK: The Making of Policy, 1981-1994', by Virginia Berridge, Oxford University Press, 1996. |