2024/06/01 by Emily Lim Rogers
Medicine · Psychology · #Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies #Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research #Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders
paper · doi:10.1086/730432
openalex publication_date 2024/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In 1984, a team of American researchers led by Robert Gallo announced that HIV causes AIDS. Seven months later, the US Centers for Disease Control investigated a postviral illness of unknown cause, which would later be known as chronic fatigue syndrome (aka myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS). This article argues that ME/CFS’s emergence was entangled with HIV/AIDS. Once the cause of AIDS was widely agreed upon by the 1990s, the virus-to-syndrome model became the predominant paradigm for understanding syndromic diseases of as-yet unknown cause. At the same time, ME/CFS—a multicausal illness—failed to fit this template, and societal disinterest fell in. Scientific uncertainty sustains the status of ME/CFS as proximate to, but not fully accepted as, bona fide “disease.” This has implications for the history of disability and the history of medicine, as ME/CFS sits uneasily between these bodies of knowledge, demonstrating the thorny and socially overdetermined process of medicalization.