No Average Joe

As he pushes past his own personal pain, Dr. Joseph Cofrancesco continues to dedicate his life’s work to helping others.

- JANE MARION

WHEN JOSEPH COFRANCESCO was getting his medical education—as a student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, an intern at Columbia Presbyterian, then a resident in primary care at Albert Einstein College of Medicine—the AIDS epidemic was raging. And at that time, New York was affected by the deadly disease more than any other city in America.

“In the late ’80s, when I was in training, AIDS was full-blown,” says Cofrancesco. “We heard stories about patients having their food trays left outside the door and nurses refusing to go in their rooms. Fortunately, I never witnessed that, but it was still a pretty frightening time— and there was no New York Times article for the first 100,000 dead. The president [Ronald Reagan] never even said the word ‘AIDS.’”

Mostly what Cofrancesco recalls of those days is the suffering he saw. “When I was in med school, everyone with AIDS died,” he says. “And when I was an intern, we had [the drug] AZT, which people took every four hours through the night, and made everyone sick. Patients lasted maybe six months, then got sick and died. People were dying all around, and no one seemed to care. It was awful.”