Two years after putting on the surgical space suit, Day resigned her position at San Francisco General. Even today, they make no secret of the fact that they consider Day and her positions “disruptive,” at the least. And her bosses at San Francisco General remained adamantly behind the law that prevented mandatory testing. AIDS experts acknowledged that doctors and nurses were at risk and recommended precautions, but Day’s space suit definitely was not among their suggestions. Gay activists argued that her actions could lead to discrimination against homosexual patients. The image suggested that she was treating her patients as pariahs.ĭay endured a firestorm of criticism. Four years later, Day spoke out for mandatory HIV testing of all hospital patients, and, finally, she donned a full-body “space suit” while operating on patients classified as high-risk for the disease. Richard Fine, chief of staff at San Francisco General, “she would have been a Kennedy-conspiracy theorist.” But Day pursued a different theory: In 1983, she was among the first to ask whether surgeons were putting themselves at risk of contagion when operating on HIV-infected patients.

These are, quite literally, matters of life and death.ĭay didn’t become controversial by chance: Her style is incontrovertibly confrontational. Lorraine Day, the former chief of orthopedic surgery at San Francisco General Hospital, is at the center of some of the most emotionally charged issues of the AIDS epidemic: the rights and risks of patient and physician in the face of the virus called HIV. The meeting place is not her home she won’t reveal where she lives.

This morning, she’s sitting in a modest stucco house in the high desert.

She is an elegant, composed blond woman in her mid-50s, slim, fashionably dressed.

Operation body count doom