“[Dr. Mathilde Krim] called a number of her colleagues to request KS [Kaposi’s sarcoma] samples to study, but Memorial Sloan Kettering, she was told, had instituted a formal ban on treating victims of the gay cancer. That the city’s preeminent cancer hospital was turning away people with cancer made no sense to her. The hospital administration told her the directive came from the president and CEO, Paul Marks. “It was not to be encouraged for people with GRID [Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, an early name for AIDS] to come to Sloan Kettering,” she was told. The cold cruelty of her hospital’s GRID policy was to her a scandal, and not an isolated one. Forced to look elsewhere for tissue samples to study, she soon discovered that other New York–area hospitals had also begun to refuse GRID patients. Only the NYU Medical Center, where Friedman-Kien and Linda Laubenstein had dived headlong into Kaposi’s sarcoma, was openly taking patients. But even there, tensions arose. When Friedman-Kien presented his earliest case at grand rounds, Dr. Saul Farber, the bombastic head of internal medicine, had his retinue of residents and interns wear head-to-foot protective gear, and he himself wore the unnecessary garb. They looked like an expedition of space explorers, and gave the sick patient a fright. “This,” Friedman-Kien said of his patient, “is just the beginning of a disaster. This is going to be a pandemic.” To which Farber replied, still in earshot, “But why does NYU have to be the Titanic?” Farber later adopted his own anti-GRID policy, ruling that those patients could not be admitted to shared rooms, and consequently had to be held in the ER when the limited number of isolation rooms filled up. He knew that GRID patients posed no risk to roommates. But Farber considered the containment policy necessary because applications for residencies at NYU from top medical schools had lagged, either from fear of GRID or because a hospital overwhelmed with the disease presumably lacked the diversity of illnesses that ambitious physicians sought. The effect was to keep sick patients on temporary gurneys lining the first-floor hallways, held there for days or weeks, sometimes breathing their last breaths without ever having been admitted. Next Krim reached out to Craig Metroka, a young, unimposing oncologist who was seeing KS patients at another hospital[. …] He admitted to wishing he could treat all the patients referred to him, but as the clinic allotted space to him just one day a week, he was forced to turn away many. With all the GRID and suffering around her […] she joined the resistance. She invited Metroka to turn her lab into an underground center for GRID patients. Krim knew they had to carry out this operation without detection or they would be shut down. “Tell your patients to come to my office after six o’clock,” she said, and he gratefully agreed to do so. Thereafter, she convened an informal group of researchers, including scientists in San Francisco and Los Angeles, to begin collecting blood and tissue for future examination. […] Every night, on her way home, she secretly greeted Metroka and his furtive KS patients as they snuck past security. Those young men, wasting away with disease, had the same hollowed gaze she had first seen in that 1945 film clip [of liberated Nazi concentration camps], some so weak they gripped the wall for support.”
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David France, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS (2016), Pt. 1, Ch. 3
(via enoughtohold)Dr. Mathilde Krim died January 15, 2018.
Activist Peter Staley, known for his work with ACT UP, wrote on Facebook:
My greatest AIDS hero died a few hours ago. Dr. Mathilde Krim, founder of amfAR [one of the earliest AIDS research foundations], warrior against homophobia and AIDS-related stigma, dedicated defender of science and public health, and mother-figure and mentor to countless activists, will leave a deep hole in the continued fight against AIDS — a fight she dedicated her life to. She was 91.
(via enoughtohold)
Published
Iron in the Sand 