We can identify two periods in the history of AIDS patient narratives: before and after the discovery of triple therapies. We analyse the changes this paradigm shift produced on literature.

Venereal diseases were a heavy burden in the early twentieth century. Syphilis was the paradigm of physical and psychological degeneration, the destroyer of family and society, and the syphilitic individual was the subject of eugenic strategies: isolation, sterilisation and, in extreme cases, extermination. In the early

«Detailed evidence shows that Nietzsche passed through each of the three stages: the chancre of primary syphilis; the terrible pox, fever and pain of secondary syphilis; and the dreaded third, paresis» In the foothills of the Italian Alps, on a snow-draped piazza in Turin, on January