Linda Laubenstein

Linda Jane Laubenstein (May 21, 1947 – August 15, 1992) was an American physician and early HIV/AIDS researcher. She was among the first doctors in the United States to recognize the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s; she co-authored the first article linking AIDS with Kaposi's sarcoma.

Laubenstein was raised in Barrington, Rhode Island, where a childhood bout of polio left her paraplegic and using a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She graduated from Barnard College in 1969 and received her medical degree from New York University School of Medicine, where she specialized in hematology and oncology. She went on to become a clinical professor before leaving to focus on treating AIDS patients in her private practice. In addition to her medical work, she was an outspoken AIDS activist and co-founded a non-profit organization, Multitasking, which provided employment to people with AIDS.

After Laubenstein's death in 1992, aged 45, the New York State Department of Health established an award named after her for HIV/AIDS physicians. She was also memorialized in Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart and its subsequent film adaptation.

Early life Linda Laubenstein was born on May 21, 1947, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Priscilla and George Laubenstein. She grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island. Her mother worked as a special-education preschool teacher, while her father worked as a purchasing agent for Providence Gas Company. As a child, she had severe asthma and contracted polio at the age of five. She was placed in an iron lung for three months to prevent respiratory failure and was left paraplegic; she would use a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She went on to study at the New York University School of Medicine, receiving her M.D. in 1973 While working in private practice in New York City, she observed a sudden increase in the number of cases of Kaposi's sarcoma—a rare cancer that would later be identified as an AIDS-defining illness—in young gay men with immune deficiencies. The first patient she diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, in 1979, was a gay man with a generalized rash and enlarged lymph nodes; two weeks later, a colleague asked her to see a second patient, another gay man, with the same disease. Both men turned out to be friends with Gaëtan Dugas – often called the "patient zero" of HIV/AIDS in North America (although more recent studies have demonstrated that he did not bring the virus to the continent) ) – who the men told Laubenstein had a similar rash. In 1981, when Dugas, a Canadian, heard about Kaposi's sarcoma, he traveled to New York from Montreal to consult with Laubenstein and Friedman-Kien and visited their practice for monthly chemotherapy treatments. By 1982, Laubenstein had treated 62 patients with Kaposi's sarcoma. In 1986, she and Jeffrey B. Greene founded a non-profit organization, Multitasking. at the age of 45 on August 15, 1992, while staying at her family's home in Chatham, Massachusetts. Kramer, an activist as well as a playwright, hoped that his portrayal of Laubenstein would "enshrine her legacy forever". Since the play opened in 1984, the character has been played by Ellen Barkin in a Broadway production and Julia Roberts in a film adaptation.

Her collected papers are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

Selected published works