When Dr. Anthony Fauci, special adviser to the White House, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases and icon in the fight once morest Covid-19 in the United States, learned of the death of Paul Farmer, he might not holding back tears, saying he had just lost a brother and the world a public health giant. But the death, on February 21, at the age of 62, of the doctor and anthropologist, of a heart attack, while he was in Rwanda, touched a large audience well beyond the scientific community.
A book dedicated to him in 1993 by literary journalist Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (lift the mountains, Boréal, 2011), presented it as “the man who would heal the world”. This laudatory biography made him a true hero of humanitarian action in the service of the poor.
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Born on October 26, 1959, in North Adams (Massachusetts) to a supermarket cashier mother and a high school math teacher father, Paul Farmer spent his adolescence with his five brothers and sisters in a bus transformed into a mobile home, who criss-crossed Florida. Having done his undergraduate studies at Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), he then obtained his two doctorates in medicine and anthropology at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). It was in this prestigious institution that he spent his entire career, teaching both social medicine and medical anthropology, and directing the division of equality in health at the hospital and the department of public health. at the faculty of medicine.
While he was still a student, he created a health center in Haiti for the most disadvantaged, an experience that informed his first book., AIDS and Accusationawarded several prizes and translated into French under the title AIDS in Haiti. The accused victim (Karthala, 1996). He showed how the HIV epidemic in Haiti had given rise both to accusations of witchcraft within society itself and to suspicions with regard to the United States, awakening a long history of a relationship of domination between the two countries.
The ten books he subsequently published all dealt with social inequalities and their consequences on health, in particular Infections and Inequalities, translated under the title Contemporary plagues (Economic, 2005). Through poignant stories and relentless analysis, it provides an understanding of how social structures and power relations, both locally and internationally, determine the distribution of disease, whether AIDS, tuberculosis or Ebola virus infection. He saw health as a human right under threat all over the world.
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