“Medicine should be viewed as social justice work in a world that is so sick and so riven by inequities.”– Dr. Paul Farmer (1959 – 2022)
Paul Farmer was a physician, anthropologist and humanitarian who gained global acclaim for his work delivering high-quality health care to some of the world’s poorest people.
He helped to found the global public health organization Partners in Health.
In college Farmer underwent a dramatic conversion the night Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered. He attended a prayer vigil that night on his college campus, and later told a friend it felt as if the scales fell from his eyes, suddenly realizing that to be a Christian meant you had to be on the side of the poor and to serve Christ in the poor.
Dr. Farmer attracted public renown with “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” a 2003 book by Tracy Kidder that described the extraordinary efforts he would make to care for patients, sometimes walking hours to their homes to ensure they were taking their medication.
He was a practitioner of “social medicine,” arguing there was no point in treating patients for diseases only to send them back into the desperate circumstances that contributed to them in the first place. Illness, he said, has social roots and must be addressed through social structures.
His work with Partners in Health significantly influenced public health strategies for responding to tuberculosis, H.I.V. and Ebola. During the AIDS crisis in Haiti, he went door to door to deliver antiviral medication, confounding many in the medical field who believed it would be impossible for poor rural people to survive the disease.
Though he worked in the world of development, he often took a critical view of international aid, preferring to work with local providers and leaders. And he often lived among the people he was treating, moving his family to Rwanda and Haiti for extended periods.
Several quotes give a glimpse of his heart and his vision:
“It’s not just about health security . . . “It’s not just about charity, although that’s not so bad. It’s also about pragmatic solidarity with those in need of assistance.”
“If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?”
“To pull a million people out of poverty in the last several years, to build stable institutions where none existed—to me, that is about hope and it’s about rejecting despair and cynicism. Those are the two biggest dead ends we’ve got: despair and cynicism.”
“With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others—or, in a word, partnership.”
Would it not be a blessing to many if the United Stated, the richest country in the world, would adopt the mindset and strategies of Paul Farmer to provide better healthcare to the poor!
Peace and All Good - John
John Blewitt is the founder of Nonviolent Navarro. You can read thoughts and find information of upcoming events on the Nonviolent Navarro Facebook Page. Contact John at jblewitt@bellsouth.net.
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