No one really remembers. Actually, that is not altogether true. There are those who do recall, the ones who survived the terrifying place that New York became in the 1980s, when a disease with no fixed medical designation -- beyond an acronym that made it seem as though those most affected were somehow its cause -- was killing people in droves. Before they died, they suffered. That is something, too, that few who came of age after the development of so-called miracle drugs can be expected to recall. They were blinded. They became incontinent. They were paralyzed. They lost their mental faculties. They succumbed to the kinds of infections to which people with normal immune systems never give a moment's thought. As if their physical maladies were not sufficiently biblical, they often found themselves treated not with compassion but as bearers of plague -- at work stigmatized, by the medical profession often shunned, by their families cast out and disowned. There is value in reciting the trials that accompanied the onset of AIDS, because without it as context, there is so much that cannot be understood. Take the accomplishments of Judith Peabody, a socialite and philanthropist who died at 80 on July 25. Without the proper context, one might know only that Peabody raised money for causes, as rich people are expected to do; that she gave and attended parties; that she dressed in clothes by Bill Blass, Carolina Herrera, Adolfo, Oscar de la Renta and Yves Saint Laurent; and that, like many women of her generation and era, she 'volunteered.' The obituaries made due note of her sense of the obligations that she felt came with her social position. What most left out was the quality that made her an exception among women who employ private secretaries and buy their wardrobes from couturiers and attend charity parties and have their hair dressed regularly, as she did, in a lacquered mane that, like Brooke Astor's hat and gloves, became a visual signature. What made Judith Peabody stand out on the philanthropic circuit was a level of involvement far from typical of women on the charity-ball circuit. Wading into a mysterious viral epidemic, Peabody -- figuratively, at least -- rolled up her sleeves. As early as 1985, Peabody, once described in these pages as 'the former Judith Dunnington, who made her debut at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, L.I., and who is married to Samuel P. Peabody of the distinguished Peabody family,' turned up unannounced at the Gay Men's Health Crisis office to offer herself as a volunteer. She was invited to sit in on the Drop-In Care Partners group, of which she would eventually become a leader. The group was open to people with the primary responsibility for the care of a person with AIDS and focused on what one reporter called 'the emotional difficulties, practical problems, and turmoil' that those people faced. At the start, 'a lot of the talk was about death, or cytomegalovirus or diarrhea or medications or whether or not someone should start on AZT,' said John Tatarakis, an advanced-practice nurse who was Peabody's co-facilitator. He referred to maladies now largely brought under control by medications of which AZT was among the more controversial and earliest. 'The rule we had as a care-giver group was to allow that talk a few minutes but to focus on the experience of taking care of the person, because a lot of the rest of it was a complete mystery,' Tatarakis said. There was little mystery, however, about the stigma associated with the disease, particularly, as Marjorie J. Hill, the director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, said, among gay men. 'Gay men with AIDS were the scourge of the earth' in the days when Peabody first waded into the midst of the epidemic, Hill said. 'There was this constant with her of consoling and holding people's hands.' It may seem far-fetched now to suggest that there was anything unusual about clasping the hand of a person with AIDS. But, as Hill said, even some medical personnel were fearful of touch. 'Judy would go into hospitals, immaculately, spectacularly dressed in Dior and Gucci, and she would see a meal tray sitting outside a room,' where an orderly had left it. 'And Judy, with her mink coat in her arm, would bring dignity to the situation by letting everyone know that she was best friends with the chief of the board of the hospital and that they had better get that tray into the room.' Dr. Jonathan L. Jacobs, executive director of the Center for Special Studies, a support facility at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for people with HIV/AIDS, explained that AIDS was so poorly understood when Peabody became involved that 'people were frightened that if they came in contact with people who had it, they would get it.' It was not uncommon, he added, for people with AIDS to ask for their deaths to be certified as having been caused by cancer, rather than the virus itself. The social response to the terrors people suffered, Jacobs added, 'ranged from fear to indifference.' Peabody was far from indifferent. Intelligent and educated (she attended Bryn Mawr for two years), she followed a pattern common among women of her generation and chose marriage over a career. Nowadays, said Catie Marron, the chairwoman of the board of trustees of the New York Public Library, women like her might 'go on to be doctors' rather than society wives, and to act from the main stage on issues like AIDS, instead of lending assistance from the wings. 'Maybe that's not what you did at that point or could do,' she said. All the same, she added, Peabody 'had a sense of purpose, which some people have and some don't, and she used it and she fulfilled it.' There were others like her, of course, said Sean Driscoll, an owner of Glorious Foods, the catering company that dominated the New York charity-ball circuit for decades. 'Pat Buckley, Nan Kempner, a lot of those women got involved with cancer research,' Driscoll said. 'They did do 'hospital' in quotation marks,' he added, meaning the sort of bandage-wrapping drudgery that society women have performed since the Civil War. But the bulk of the work they did, as what Buckley used to call 'the beasts of burden' on the charity circuit, was to shake money from the pockets of wealthy friends. Peabody did that, too, of course. But she also packed a sandwich most days when she left her Fifth Avenue apartment, to eat in hospital waiting rooms. 'What really set Judy apart is that, from the early '80s, when nobody knew what the facts were, she looked at these people who were not being cared for and saw them as individuals and not a disease,' Driscoll said. Like Astor, she embraced the responsibilities of her wealth and position in a manner that was almost feudal. Peabody resembled 'the duchess in the village where the castle is,' said Louise Grunwald, a philanthropist and political fundraiser. 'She was a good duchess, like the Duchess of Marlborough, who took her responsibilities very seriously and ministered to the people in the village.' That the people in her particular village were 'the most marginalized,' and often those furthest from her own milieu of 'incredible social privilege' was what set her apart, Jacobs said. Judith Peabody did not invent noblesse oblige, said William Norwich, special correspondent for Town & Country magazine, which publishes an annual issue devoted to philanthropy. And it didn't end with her death. 'Look, she came from a family of brave philanthropists,' Norwich added, referring to both Peabody's husband and her mother-in-law, who was once arrested during a civil rights protest and spent time in a Southern jail. 'What made her different was she was always going into areas where polite society didn't go, and she did it in an Adolfo suit and with the big hair because, as she once told me, 'They're expecting Mrs. Peabody, and I have to look like Mrs. Peabody.'' 'Friends of hers would tell her: 'I can't believe you're doing that. We don't know people like that,'' Norwich added, referring the AIDS patients Peabody cared for. 'She felt she had a duty. You don't hear the word much anymore, but it used to be in the curriculum.' 