Matthew Kelly

The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the 19th and 20th centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the 20th century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the 21st century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.