Sensing Light

In 1978, a young street hustler in San Francisco stumbles into the General Hospital emergency room with lungs so congested he can barely breathe. Seen by an overworked and perplexed young intern, the patient becomes the first of many to die from a yet-to-be named plague. Sensing Light from Dark is a raw, compelling novel that follows the personal and professional struggles of the men and women on the front lines of the emerging AIDS epidemic.

This breakout book by Mark A. Jacobson, a leading Bay Area AIDS physician, follows the lives of three people from vastly different walks of life, who find themselves thrown together by a shared urgency to find out what is killing so many men in the prime of their lives. Kevin, a gay intern from working class Boston, has just moved to San Francisco in search of acceptance of his own sexual identity. Herb, the supervising physician struggles with his Chinese background in the exhausting world of one of the nation's toughest hospitals. And Gwen, a divorced mother with a teen daughter looks for a sense of self while completing her medical degree. This fast-paced story sheds light on the complex process of uncovering the causes of an unknown epidemic, while at the same time revealing the tight bonds that are established by doctors working to solve the 20th century's most tragic medical mystery.

Mark A. Jacobson is a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and an attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital. He began his internship in June, 1981, days after the CDC reported a mysterious, fatal form of immunodeficiency in five gay men. Four months later, he was assigned responsibility for a critically ill patient with this syndrome, the first of several thousand people with AIDS he has cared for over his career.