Paul Farmer

Paul Edward Farmer (October 26, 1959 – February 21, 2022) was an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer held an MD and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was a University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was the co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that, since 1987, has provided direct healthcare services and undertaken research and advocacy activities for those who are sick and living in poverty. 

He was a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Farmer and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings in the U.S. and abroad. Their work is documented in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, the British Medical Journal, and Social Science and Medicine.

Farmer wrote extensively on Health and Human Rights, the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases, and global health. He was known as "the man who would cure the world," as described in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Farmer and Partners in Health received the Peace Abbey Foundation Courage of Conscience Award in 2007 for saving lives by providing free health care to people in the world’s poorest communities and working to improve healthcare systems globally. 

The story of PIH is also told in the 2017 documentary Bending the Arc. He was a proponent of liberation theology. On April 24, 2021, Farmer was awarded the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity for his work with PIH. The farmer was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, and raised in Weeki Wachee, Florida. He had first lived in Alabama for some of his childhood years. Then when his family moved to Florida, Farmer and his family of eight lived in an old school bus that his father had transformed into a mobile home. 

Farmer recounted his father as a “free spirit,” as he later on pursued commercial fishing and took his family to live with him on a houseboat in the Gulf of Mexico. Farmer’s father then anchored the houseboat in a primitive bayou called Jenkins Creek, where the family bathed, bringing jugs with drinking water from Brooksville. Farmer prioritized his education and excelled academically in school. Farmer’s parents often read serious literature to their children, motivating them to learn as much as possible about all the world had to offer. 

The family dealt with financial difficulties that often led them to work in different environments. One summer, Farmer’s family worked with Haitian migrant workers and picked citrus fruit, which was Farmer's first encounter with many Haitian people. He was the brother of former professional wrestler Jeff Farmer. He graduated from Hernando High School in Brooksville, Florida, where he was elected senior class president. He attended Duke University as a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in medical anthropology in 1982.

 While at Duke, he went to Paris for half a year and learned French fluently, which benefited him in his future work. He then came across the work of Rudolf Virchow, the 19th-century German physician, and scientist that developed public health medicine and inspired Farmer's career trajectory. Farmer’s passions were further shaped by the political atmosphere around him at the time, with civil war and revolution breaking out in Central America (including the Nicaraguan Revolution, Salvadoran Civil War, and Guatemalan Civil War) and the rise of liberation theology, which the Catholic clergy used to defy authoritarianism in the region. 

This ideology emphasized the “preferential option for the poor,” which consisted of the physical and spiritual well-being of the poor as a crucial component of the word of God. To some followers of Christianity, part of “liberation theology" that Christians need to focus on as their primary obligation involves helping the least fortunate of those around them.

Farmer later became involved with migrant labor camps near campus and came into contact with Sister Juliana DeWolf. She was working with the United Farm Workers, seeking to ameliorate the living circumstances of the laborers harvesting tobacco. Through this encounter, Farmer befriended many of the Haitian farm workers and listened to their life experiences and stories. He became interested in Haiti and began learning Creole, interviewing Haitian migrant workers, and reading about Haiti's history. 

In 1983, while still in school, he started working with villages in Haiti's Central Plateau to help incorporate modern healthcare practices in their communities. He wrote and co-wrote over 100 scholarly papers and several books. After graduating from Duke, Farmer began volunteering at a hospital in Cange, Haiti. 

Subsequently, he attended Harvard University, earning an MD and a Ph.D. in medical anthropology in 1990, returning to Haiti multiple times during medical school to continue his work in Cange. He completed an internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1993 and an infectious disease fellowship in 1996. The farmer was board certified in internal medicine and infectious disease.