Unclaimed
Paul Farmer
Health & Medicine
Medical anthropologist and physician who co-founded Partners In Health and advanced community-based models to deliver high-quality care in resource-poor settings.
Biography
Paul Farmer held an MD and a PhD from Harvard University and served as a University Professor and 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 providing direct health care, research, and advocacy for people living in poverty, and he was professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Farmer and colleagues pioneered community-based treatment strategies that showed high-quality care could be delivered in resource-poor settings; their work has been documented in major medical and public-health journals. He wrote extensively on health and human rights, the role of social inequalities in infectious disease outcomes, promoted community health workers and decentralized care models, and was described in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains as “the man who would cure the world.”
Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Excerpt, formatting adapted
Books by Paul Farmer
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds (2020) is Farmer’s account of the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic, explaining why the medical response was slow and tracing its roots to centuries of exploitation and injustice. Drawing on his firsthand experience—Partners In Health was among the international responders—the book combines reportage, history, and advocacy to argue for stronger, community-based health systems.