|
"Farmer would say of his childhood, 'The way I tell myself the story
is a little too neat. I'd like to be able to say that when I was young
I lived in a trailer park, picked fruit with Haitians, got interested
in migrant farmworkers, and went to Latin America. All true, but not the
truth. We're asked to have tidy biographies that are coherent. Everyone
does that. But the fact is, a perfectly discrepant version has the same
ending.'"
- Mountains Beyond Mountains
Born in 1959, Dr. Paul Farmer, spent much of his childhood living on a
bus and aboard a boat. Intensely curious and an academic achiever, Farmer
graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1982 with a bachelor's
degree in anthropology. Farmer made his first trip to Haiti in 1983. In
1990, he received MD and PhD degrees in medical anthropology from Harvard.
Founding director of Partners in Health, an international health care
organization helping those who are sick and living in poverty, Farmer's
work draws primarily on active clinical practice and focuses on diseases
that disproportionately afflict the poor. Today, Partners in Health partner
projects may be found in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Rwanda,
and the US.
Farmer has received multiple humanitarian and medical awards. His work
has also been recognized by a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
"genius award." Farmer has written extensively about health
and human rights, and about the role of social inequalities in the distribution
and outcome of infectious diseases. He is the author of Pathologies of
Power, Infections and Inequalities, The Uses of Haiti, and AIDS and Accusation.
In addition, he is co-editor of Women, Poverty, and AIDS and of The Global
Impact of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis.
Dr. Farmer's work has also received critical acclaim from the media.
Click
here to see CBS's 60 Minutes' coverage of this humanitarian
effort.
|
