Sweating with Elegance

I’m going through material that I’ve dug out of the bottom drawer of the desk in my office. I’ve found that when you want to clear out things, a bottom drawer is a good place to start.

One thing I found is something from the Fourth International AIDS Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1988. 

We had seen this case of an infection that had never been described before and submitted to the conference for presentation, and it was accepted. 

Dr. Bill Valenti reviews the letter he received in 1988, accepting his presentation at the Fourth Annual AIDS Conference in Stockholm.

Everyone who was presenting was describing cases that had never been seen before. There was a huge amount of interest and energy in the room, and there were probably 4,000 people in the session. That was my first gig in front of an international audience and it went well. I was soaked after the presentation from just sweating so much. 

Dr. Joep Lange. Image from Wikipedia

The moderator was Dr. Joep Lange from The Netherlands. He was a very well-known global presence in the movement. At the end of the presentation, he said to me, “That was a very elegant presentation” in his English as a second language style.

He was so elegant himself.

The sad part is that he died in 2014 in a plane crash on his way to another AIDS conference. It represents just a huge loss to the movement. I always remember him. We used to see each other after that at other conferences and talk in between times about what a motivator he was to the global AIDS effort. So rest well, Joep Lange.