Power of Posters

Intrigued by a poster about preventing AIDS that he saw on a Boston subway car in the early 1990s, Edward Atwater, M.D. (M ’50), began collecting AIDS education posters to track how different societies viewed and responded to the epidemic. Atwater, a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, donated his collection of more than 6,000 posters from more than 100 countries to the University’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library. Michael Gottlieb, M.D. (M ’73), who, in 1981, became the first physician to author a report to the Centers for Disease Control identifying AIDS as a brand new disease, visited the campus in October for a talk at the Medical Center. Gottlieb, a leader in the care of AIDS patients and the study of treatments for AIDS, examined the Atwater collection during his Rochester visit. About 1,600 of the posters can be viewed online at http://aep.lib.rochester.edu/