19 Facts About Joseph Sonnabend

Joseph Sonnabend was widely respected as a pioneering and compassionate clinician and researcher.

Joseph Sonnabend was born on 6 January 1933 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia.

Joseph Sonnabend's mother was a physician and his father a sociologist.

Joseph Sonnabend died on 24 January 2021 at Wellington Hospital in London, as a result of complications arising from a heart attack he had suffered three weeks earlier.

Joseph Sonnabend was one of the first physicians to notice among his gay male patients the immune deficiency that would later be named AIDS.

Later, Joseph Sonnabend's advice regarding condoms would be accepted as fundamental to HIV prevention.

Joseph Sonnabend was particularly concerned by the ethical issues around the AIDS crisis, winning the Nellie Westerman Prize for Research in Ethics with his co-authors in 1983 for the article "Confidentiality, Informed Consent and Untoward Social Consequences in Research on a 'New Killer Disease' " in the journal Clinical Research.

Joseph Sonnabend has written about how the AIDS crisis required a "more intimate" kind of practice; Dr Krim described that "he's the only doctor I know who goes to every funeral".

Joseph Sonnabend did not shy away from criticising the scientific establishment when he felt it was failing to put patients' interests first.

Until the late 1990s Joseph Sonnabend continued to assert that the issue of AIDS causation "remained open" and that many factors might be involved.

Joseph Sonnabend became an early advocate for combination antiretroviral therapy, which he prescribed to numerous patients.

Joseph Sonnabend suggested that in many people HIV lies dormant without provoking a sufficient immune response to generate a positive antibody test result.

Joseph Sonnabend suggested that much of the funding for fighting AIDS in Africa has been misspent:.

Joseph Sonnabend is one of the true soldiers in the war against HIV.

Joseph Sonnabend is a model for a real translation of care to the patient.

Joseph Sonnabend designed community-based clinical trials when there were few precedents for such research, and he displayed ethical and professional leadership in virtually every other AIDS-related field of action.

Joseph Sonnabend was gay, although he fathered two sons in his twenties and was at one time married.

Joseph Sonnabend's sister, Yolanda Sonnabend, was a stage designer and artist.

Joseph Sonnabend composed music throughout his life, and discussed his music on the radio programme Outlook on the BBC World Service in 2018.