Paul Farmer

Paul Edward Farmer (October 26, 1959 – February 21, 2022) was an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer held an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he was the Kolokotrones University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He was professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Quotes

• The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world. https://www.facebook.com/partnersinhealth/photos/%E2%80%9Cthe-idea-that-some-lives/10151726145651986/
  • Paul Farmer, In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez

Pathologies of Power

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, University of California Press, 2003, (2005 edition: ISBN 978-0-520-24326-2

• In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity.
  • page 144

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, Random House 2004, ISBN 978-0-8129-7301-3

• I can’t sleep. There’s always somebody not getting treatment. I can’t stand that.
  • quoted on page 24.

• God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he’s not the one who’s supposed to divvy up the loot. . . You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that’s where He is.
  • quoted on page 79.

Quotes About Paul Farmer

• [It] was seemly [of Paul], I thought, resisting beatification. But then he told me, “People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.” . . . I felt a small inner disturbance. It wasn’t that the words seemed immodest. I felt I was in the presence of a different person from the one I’d been chatting with a moment ago, someone whose ambitions I hadn’t yet begun to fathom.
  • Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (2004), page 16.