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Medical
anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is a founding
director of Partners In Health, an international
charity organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes
research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living
in poverty. Dr. Farmer’s work draws primarily on active clinical
practice (he is an attending physician in infectious diseases and chief
of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham
and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and medical director of a
charity hospital, the Clinique Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti) and focuses
on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor. Along with his colleagues
at BWH, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard
Medical School, and in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, Dr. Farmer has pioneered
novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis
(including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis). Dr. Farmer and his colleagues
have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that
quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings.
Dr. Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights, and
about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome
of infectious diseases. He is the author of Pathologies of Power (University
of California Press, 2003), Infections and Inequalities (University
of California Press, 1998), The Uses of Haiti (Common Courage Press,
1994), and AIDS and Accusation (University of California Press, 1992).
In addition, he is co-editor of Women, Poverty, and AIDS (Common Courage
Press, 1996) and of The Global Impact of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis
(Harvard Medical School and Open Society Institute, 1999).
Dr. Farmer is the recipient of the Duke University Humanitarian Award,
the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association,
the American Medical Association’s Outstanding International Physician
(Nathan Davis) Award, and the Heinz Humanitarian Award. In 1993, he
was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius
award” in recognition of his work. Dr. Farmer is the subject of
Pulitzer Prizewinner Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains:
The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Random
House, 2003).
Dr. Farmer received his Bachelor’s degree from Duke University
and his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is the Presley Professor
of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard
Medical School.
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