Paul Farmer, a doctor and anthropologist who sought to carry high-quality well being care to among the world’s poorest folks, died on Monday in Rwanda. He was 62.
Companions in Well being, the worldwide public well being group that Dr. Farmer co-founded, introduced his dying in a press release that didn’t specify the trigger. Dr. Farmer beforehand lived in Rwanda and spent a long time centered on bettering its well being care system.
Dr. Farmer gained public renown thanks largely to “Mountains Past Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Treatment the World,” a 2003 ebook by Tracy Kidder. It instructed Dr. Farmer’s life story and celebrated his devotion to serving to the neediest.
After he graduated from school in 1982, Dr. Farmer lived for years amongst Haiti’s poorest farmers, sleeping for just one or two hours an evening as he arrange a brand new medical infrastructure.
He finally returned to america to attend Harvard Medical College and earn a level in anthropology, however he continued to spend a lot of his time in Cange, the neighborhood the place he constructed his first clinic, returning to Harvard for exams and laboratory work.
Over time that adopted, Dr. Farmer raised tens of millions of {dollars}, which had been funneled to an ever-expanding community of neighborhood well being services. He had a contagious enthusiasm; when Thomas White, who owned a big development firm in Boston, requested to satisfy him, he insisted that the assembly happen in Haiti.
Mr. White turned a core donor, and contributed $1 million in seed cash to Companions in Well being, which Dr. Farmer based in 1987, together with Ophelia Dahl, one other volunteer in Haiti, and a former Duke classmate, Todd McCormack.
The clinic in Haiti, at first a single room, grew, over time, right into a hospital and adjoining nursing faculty, serving a neighborhood of greater than 150,000 folks.
Dr. Farmer turned a public well being luminary, the topic of a 2017 documentary, “Bending the Arc,” and the creator of 12 books. The newest, “Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of Historical past,” sought to dispel the extra lurid misconceptions concerning the sickness and give attention to the dearth of well being care necessities in higher West Africa.
“For all their rainfall,” Dr. Farmer wrote, “their residents are stranded within the medical desert.”
In 2020, Dr. Farmer acquired the $1 million Berggruen Prize, given yearly to an individual whose concepts have “profoundly formed human self-understanding and development in a quickly altering world.”
The chairman of the prize committee, Kwame Anthony Appiah, mentioned Dr. Farmer had “reshaped our understanding” of “what it means to deal with well being as a human proper and the moral and political obligations that comply with.”
Dr. Farmer’s survivors embrace his spouse, Didi Bertrand Farmer, a researcher for Companions in Well being, and their youngsters, Elizabeth, Catherine and Sebastian.
A full obituary might be printed quickly.
