Photo courtesy of Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University
Copyright: © President and Fellows of Harvard College
In the recent history of global public health, the late medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., stands out among luminaries. Farmer was renowned for using novel strategies to treat and control infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, AIDS and Ebola in some of the poorest populations in the world. A celebrated humanitarian, Farmer was also admired for his unwavering devotion to economically depressed people vulnerable to preventable diseases in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda and other low-income countries with weak governmental infrastructure.
Farmer, who died unexpectedly last month, was driven by the conviction that in impoverished populations, communicable diseases had more to do with social determinants of health than individual behavior. Certainly, he was not the first physician or academic to argue that disease had more to do with nonmedical factors that include deficient public health policies and racist and classist attitudes. Physicians, sociologists, and intellectuals influenced his brand of health care — including W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington — who have argued that poor health trends were linked to unsanitary housing conditions, unsafe workspaces, inadequate public infrastructure and the legacy of slavery.
But Farmer stands out among those who shared his vision for his relentlessness. For almost 40 years, Farmer urged lawmakers, corporate titans, public health policymakers and others with the power to change social structures to improve roads, schools, and clean water distribution to give socially disadvantaged people the opportunity to live their healthiest lives. And the physician talked the talk and walked the walk: Partners in Health, the organization he helped co-found in the late 1980s, has worked with governments around the world to improve or build clinics, hospitals, sanitation systems and other public infrastructure in areas that have been historically underserved.
Farmer died on Feb. 21 on the grounds of a hospital and medical university he helped establish in Butaro, Rwanda. Partners in Health said in a statement he had died in his sleep of an acute cardiac event. He was 62.
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Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum (@mbirnbaumnews) is AHCJ's Health Equity Core Topic Leader. An independent journalist who has covered health disparities, Birnbaum’s stories have been published by American Heart Association News and WebMD.
