Paul Farmer

Biography

Paul Edward Farmer (October 26, 1959 – February 21, 2022) was an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer held an MD and PhD 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 health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He was 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. Farmer pioneered the concept of community health works and decentralized models of care. 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 health care 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 named Aurora Humanitarian in recognition of his work with PIH. He died of a heart attack in 2022.