Description
Amid the HIV/AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, Chicago’s only public hospital became a frontline provider. Yet Cook County Hospital’s critical role in providing HIV/AIDS care was the result of activism, not policy. Hospital administration restricted HIV/AIDS care while activist providers and patients scrambled to assemble the finances, space, and labor required to meet the needs of an epidemic that preyed disproportionately on Chicago’s most vulnerable populations. The paper, a chapter of Zanoni’s in-progress book manuscript, recounts the stories of patients and providers who set up a clinic that provided comprehensive medical care and social support to women—including many drug-using poor women of color—and their children, and otherwise advocated for quality HIV/AIDS care. Activists’ push for the public provision of quality HIV/AIDS care forwarded a model of health care that was built, in defiance of prejudice, around society’s most disparaged patients.
About the Speaker
Amy Zanoni is a historian of social welfare and social movements in the twentieth-century U.S. currently working on a book called Poor Health: The Story of Chicago’s Only Public Hospital. Through the lens of Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, Poor Health charts the enduring importance of the local public hospital and the sustained advocacy for just public sector health care over the course of the twentieth century.
Zanoni received a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University in 2020. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including, most recently, an ACLS Fellowship (2024-2025) and a Southern Methodist University Center for Presidential History Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020-2022). Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Policy History, Dissent, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and various edited collections. Since 2022, Zanoni has worked for a literary arts organization and an organization dedicated to making higher education a public good.
Respondent
Rene Esparza
About the Labor History Seminar Series
The Labor History Seminar provides a forum for works in progress that explore the history of working class people, communities, and culture; class and state policy; unions and popular political movements; and other related topics.
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This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
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