DR. PAUL FARMER

A week or so ago, Anita and I were watching television coverage of the devastation in Haiti when CNN did an interview with Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House). Kidder’s comments about the devastation in Haiti were particularly valuable because of his intimate knowledge of health care in Haiti.

Listening to Kidder reminded me that I had written about Dr. Paul Farmer several years ago. Anita searched our computer files and came up with two essays I wrote about him in 2005 and 2006.

Farmer’s father was a large man who played basketball and was called Elbows by his opponents. His children called him The Warden because he was so strict with them. The Warden and his wife reared their family in Brooksvillle, Florida, where they lived in a bus they called The Bluebird Inn and later on a houseboat which his father wanted to burn after it hit a sandbar. (The Warden never paid attention to buoys.)

All through his life, Paul Farmer needed constantly to be affirmed. He was always asking his peers, “How am I doing?” That’s probably because whatever he did was never good enough for the Warden. If Paul came home from high school with an A, the Warden wanted to know who got an A plus. When Paul won a scholarship to Duke, the Warden made light of it. When after college he called the Warden and told him he had been accepted into Harvard Medical School, the Warden did not congratulate him but told Paul he knew he would make it.

After getting his medical degree from Harvard, Paul Farmer could have made a fortune attending to the health and welfare of the wealthy in Cambridge, Mass. But as a faculty member at Harvard he chose to use his vacation time to fight infectious diseases among the poor in Haiti, Cuba, and South America. He even attended the sick and the dying in Russian prisons where tuberculosis is rampant.

Farmer is on a one-man mission to eradicate infectious diseases from the earth. To help him achieve that goal, he has enlisted the help of billionaires Bill Gates and George Soros, and has lobbied the World Bank for money to support his enterprise.

In 1993, he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius award.” Although he has received other prestigious awards since then, perhaps no award so typifies Farmer’s life and accomplishments as the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, which he received in 2003.

Back in 1987 Dr. Paul Farmer and others formally founded an organization called Partners in Health (PIH) whose mission is “to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.” As they explain on their website, PIH “strives to achieve two overarching goals: to bring the benefits of modern medical science to those most in need of them and to serve as an antidote to despair.”

If you are looking for a way to help the earthquake victims, you might visit the PIH website: http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti.

And if you haven’t read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, you’re missing one of the most engaging and inspiring stories of the decade.

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