Mark Jacobson

In March,1979, a young street hustler in San Francisco stumbles into an emergency room with lungs so congested he can barely breathe. Seen by a perplexed medical resident, the patient becomes the first of many thousands to die from a yet-to-be named plague. Sensing Light is a raw, compelling novel that follows the personal and professional lives 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 HIV/AIDS physician, follows the lives of three people from vastly different backgrounds who are thrown together by a shared urgency to find out what is killing so many men in the prime of their lives. Kevin, a gay medical resident 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 emotional rigidity 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 and security while completing her medical training.

Mark A. Jacobson is a professor of medicine at UCSF and an attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital. He began his internship days after the CDC reported a mysterious, fatal form of immunodeficiency in five gay men and soon after was assigned responsibility for critically ill patients with this syndrome.