Will to Live tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first
developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS
therapies--a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of
activists, government reformers, development agencies, and the
pharmaceutical industry. But anthropologist João Biehl also tells why
this policy, hailed as a model worldwide, has been so difficult to
implement among poor Brazilians with HIV/AIDS, who are often stigmatized
as noncompliant or untreatable, becoming invisible to the public. More
broadly, Biehl examines the political economy of pharmaceuticals that
lies behind large-scale treatment rollouts, revealing the possibilities
and inequalities that come with a magic bullet approach to health care.
By moving back and forth between the institutions shaping the Brazilian
response to AIDS and the people affected by the disease, Biehl has
created a book of unusual vividness, scope, and detail. At the core of
Will to Live is a group of AIDS patients--unemployed, homeless,
involved with prostitution and drugs--that established a makeshift
health service. Biehl chronicled the personal lives of these people for
over ten years and Torben Eskerod represents them here in more than one
hundred stark photographs.
Ethnography, social medicine, and art merge in this unique book,
illuminating the care and agency needed to extend life amid perennial
violence. Full of lessons for the future, Will to Live promises to
have a lasting influence in the social sciences and in the theory and
practice of global public health.
