The introductory chapter delineates six interpretations of AIDS as a disease entity, an illness experience, a contagious infection, a fatal affliction, an epidemic disease, and a challenge to individual liberty. The six essays in Part I examine how current knowledge of AIDS was generated and how this knowledge is interpreted. This includes a recounting of the process and outcome of a scientific subcommittee's naming of the AIDS virus, a philosophical examination of the causal explanations of AIDS, a philosophical analysis of how clinicians explain AIDS, and a perspective on how the language metaphors associated with AIDS express and influence moral attitudes toward it. In Part II, six essays explore the meaning of AIDS for health professionals and the ethical issues it may raise for them, among them being the duty to inform intimates of the AIDS patient regarding their risk of infection, the allocation of intensive-care-unit beds, and life-sustaining treatment. The six essays in Part III address ethical and health issues in public policy toward AIDS. 39-item selected bibliography, chapter notes, subject index. For individual chapters, see NCJ 123591-123605.