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Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader
For nearly thirty years, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has traveled to some of the most impoverished places on earth to bring comfort and the best possible medical care to the poorest of the poor. Driven by his stated intent to "make human rights substantial," Farmer has treated patients―and worked to address the root causes of their disease―in Haiti, Boston, Peru, Rwanda, and elsewhere in the developing world. In 1987, with several colleagues, he founded Partners In Health to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care. Throughout his career, Farmer has written eloquently and extensively on these efforts. Partner to the Poor collects his writings from 1988 to 2009 on anthropology, epidemiology, health care for the global poor, and international public health policy, providing a broad overview of his work. It illuminates the depth and impact of Farmer’s contributions and demonstrates how, over time, this unassuming and dedicated doctor has fundamentally changed the way we think about health, international aid, and social justice.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Partners In Health.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Partners In Health.
680 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
46 people are currently reading
1222 people want to read
About the author
Paul Farmer
61 books664 followersPaul Farmer was an American medical anthropologist and physician. He was Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Founding Director of Partners In Health. Among his books are Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (1999), The Uses of Haiti (1994), and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (1992). Farmer was the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and the Margaret Mead Award for his contributions to public anthropology.
Farmer was born in the U.S.A. in 1959. He married Didi Bertrand Farmer in 1996 and they had three children. He died in Rwanda in 2022, at the age of 62.
Farmer was born in the U.S.A. in 1959. He married Didi Bertrand Farmer in 1996 and they had three children. He died in Rwanda in 2022, at the age of 62.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 12, 2010
This book is life-changing, in that it has changed the way I think about poor countries and rich countries. Before I read this, I considered people in rich countries to be very fortunate, and our job was to extend the same blessings to people in poor countries, to help them develop themselves the way we had developed ourselves in earlier centuries. I saw us as primarily separate societies, though of course linked by living in one world, and by the bonds of kinship in our human family.
But this book showed me that today's situation can't really be seen as separate from the social and economic history of the world. The last few centuries have seen the colonial powers (largely the same as the rich world today) pillage their colonies (largely the same as the poor world today) transacting a massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich. The global economic powers today continue that redistribution, and the gap between rich and poor is getting wider all the time. I know that I right now, regardless of how unwittingly, am the direct beneficiary of that historical and ongoing grand theft. My relative wealth (I have clean water, food, a roof, dry bedding, indoor plumbing, electricity, internet) is not independent of their poverty, but it's part of the fabric of the same social and economic history. The wealth of rich countries didn't spring into being on its own, but was helped by innumerable interactions over a long period of time that were mostly tainted by slavery, racism, gender-inequality, class divisions, and historical and hereditary distributions of wealth and education.
In addition to the moral arguments, to the tale told again and again in the Book of Mormon, for instance, of inequality being evil in itself, of the wealthy wearing fine clothes and looking down their noses to those who can't afford them, of pride always going before the fall. In addition to the fact that we are all one human family, we're cousins to each other in very recent history, as genetics shows (our latest common ancestor living only about three thousand years ago). Totally apart from the fact that Christ tells us flat out that if we aren't one we aren't His. That King Benjamin exhorts us to give of our substance to the poor, and not to say "he brought on his own problems so I won't help him". In addition to all these things, we need to see that our wealth was in part stolen from those very poor whose fate we now hold in our hands.
I can't divorce a poor woman dying in childbirth because of a lack of the sort of care I take for granted from me sitting in a theater in my 3D glasses being entertained by the latest amusing spectacle at $15 a pop. These two seemingly separate things are part of one whole. We share one world, one society, one global economy, one human history. We're connected.
It's not like this is exactly a new idea, of course, but I wonder why I've been able to put it at the back of my mind for so long. It's odd how we can come to look on the horrible suffering of others as something we can't change and basically have little or nothing to do with, how we can separate it from our daily lives, and put these things into discrete mental compartments.
This is all about my reaction to this book, and very little about the book itself, which is a fascinating compilation of writings over 30 years about the problems of delivering health care to the poor, and analysis of the context in which these epidemics of treatable infectious disease have occurred. It's about structural violence, and how ideas kept in separate boxes are really part of the same whole, how economic and social rights are the most important human rights. About how it is nice to have a voice in government, the right not to be tortured, the right to be free from indefinite detention without charges, and so on, but those things are largely meaningless if one is dying of malnutrition, MDR-TB, or AIDS.
So what will I do? How will this change the way I live? Other than devoting a bigger chunk of my resources to supporting organizations like Partners in Health, I mean? I think I'm being called to devote my life's work to the cause of ending poverty. No other work or play could be more joyful or rewarding, not even watching on screen as beautiful people struggle for justice in 3D.
But this book showed me that today's situation can't really be seen as separate from the social and economic history of the world. The last few centuries have seen the colonial powers (largely the same as the rich world today) pillage their colonies (largely the same as the poor world today) transacting a massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich. The global economic powers today continue that redistribution, and the gap between rich and poor is getting wider all the time. I know that I right now, regardless of how unwittingly, am the direct beneficiary of that historical and ongoing grand theft. My relative wealth (I have clean water, food, a roof, dry bedding, indoor plumbing, electricity, internet) is not independent of their poverty, but it's part of the fabric of the same social and economic history. The wealth of rich countries didn't spring into being on its own, but was helped by innumerable interactions over a long period of time that were mostly tainted by slavery, racism, gender-inequality, class divisions, and historical and hereditary distributions of wealth and education.
In addition to the moral arguments, to the tale told again and again in the Book of Mormon, for instance, of inequality being evil in itself, of the wealthy wearing fine clothes and looking down their noses to those who can't afford them, of pride always going before the fall. In addition to the fact that we are all one human family, we're cousins to each other in very recent history, as genetics shows (our latest common ancestor living only about three thousand years ago). Totally apart from the fact that Christ tells us flat out that if we aren't one we aren't His. That King Benjamin exhorts us to give of our substance to the poor, and not to say "he brought on his own problems so I won't help him". In addition to all these things, we need to see that our wealth was in part stolen from those very poor whose fate we now hold in our hands.
I can't divorce a poor woman dying in childbirth because of a lack of the sort of care I take for granted from me sitting in a theater in my 3D glasses being entertained by the latest amusing spectacle at $15 a pop. These two seemingly separate things are part of one whole. We share one world, one society, one global economy, one human history. We're connected.
It's not like this is exactly a new idea, of course, but I wonder why I've been able to put it at the back of my mind for so long. It's odd how we can come to look on the horrible suffering of others as something we can't change and basically have little or nothing to do with, how we can separate it from our daily lives, and put these things into discrete mental compartments.
This is all about my reaction to this book, and very little about the book itself, which is a fascinating compilation of writings over 30 years about the problems of delivering health care to the poor, and analysis of the context in which these epidemics of treatable infectious disease have occurred. It's about structural violence, and how ideas kept in separate boxes are really part of the same whole, how economic and social rights are the most important human rights. About how it is nice to have a voice in government, the right not to be tortured, the right to be free from indefinite detention without charges, and so on, but those things are largely meaningless if one is dying of malnutrition, MDR-TB, or AIDS.
So what will I do? How will this change the way I live? Other than devoting a bigger chunk of my resources to supporting organizations like Partners in Health, I mean? I think I'm being called to devote my life's work to the cause of ending poverty. No other work or play could be more joyful or rewarding, not even watching on screen as beautiful people struggle for justice in 3D.
July 24, 2022
This book is not for the faint of heart; it's dry, dense, and long, with huge pages and tiny font. Paul Farmer moves from history and political economy to anthropology amid epidemics to structural violence to human rights and medical ethics. He covers a lot of ground and the writing is academic in nature-much of it is composed of his anthropology and epidemiology research compiled together in relevant chapters. It would be difficult for me to summarize everything I took away from this book, but I wrote a lot in the margins and found many of Farmer's so-called "radical" conclusions on health care, justice, economics, and equality to be common sense.
To summarize, economists, politicians, and world health leaders focus too much on what is cost-effective and sustainable, rather than what is ideal and right. If we are going to be cost-effective and sustainable and the cost is millions of lives of those living in poverty, what could possibly be the more important initiative that we are being cost-effective and sustainable for? Human lives must be our top priority, socioeconomic status notwithstanding. A human life in rural Haiti isn't worth any less than a human life in upper-class Los Angeles. It's easy to want to criticize Dr. Farmer for being an idealist-some of his ideas sound ridiculous and unachievable. But it's hard to criticize his documented, peer-reviewed results fraught with success dispersed throughout the book. Paul Farmer does not ask what is possible within the system-he asks what is good and then fights to change the system to accommodate those things. He also includes some great anecdotes and powerful personal stories of patients to break up the monotony of the academic, and takes an impressive multidisciplinary approach to analyzing the ills and injustices affecting the poor of the world. That leads to a final important point Dr. Farmer emphasizes: poverty and low socioeconomic status are the evils that we must fight for first, for without a basic dignified standard of living that includes sufficient food, clean water, primary education, and access to basic health care, we will never deliver effective health care or be able to fight for civil and political rights that truly mean something in the lives of the destitute poor. The poor face pressure from a variety of fronts, and we must consider them all if we are truly going to free them from the bonds that society and history have placed on many peoples and people groups.
From my Catholic perspective, even though Farmer's personal faith is complex (though he is very influenced by Catholic social teaching and liberation theology, both Catholic concepts), he is one of the most radical examples of fighting to protect human life from conception to natural death and everywhere in between, with the notable exception of his approval of contraceptives (which is a tough sell for all but the most Catholic physicians). In myriad ways, he is a radical example of solidarity with the "least of these," and of seeing that every person is made in the image of God and has an innate divine dignity.
To summarize, economists, politicians, and world health leaders focus too much on what is cost-effective and sustainable, rather than what is ideal and right. If we are going to be cost-effective and sustainable and the cost is millions of lives of those living in poverty, what could possibly be the more important initiative that we are being cost-effective and sustainable for? Human lives must be our top priority, socioeconomic status notwithstanding. A human life in rural Haiti isn't worth any less than a human life in upper-class Los Angeles. It's easy to want to criticize Dr. Farmer for being an idealist-some of his ideas sound ridiculous and unachievable. But it's hard to criticize his documented, peer-reviewed results fraught with success dispersed throughout the book. Paul Farmer does not ask what is possible within the system-he asks what is good and then fights to change the system to accommodate those things. He also includes some great anecdotes and powerful personal stories of patients to break up the monotony of the academic, and takes an impressive multidisciplinary approach to analyzing the ills and injustices affecting the poor of the world. That leads to a final important point Dr. Farmer emphasizes: poverty and low socioeconomic status are the evils that we must fight for first, for without a basic dignified standard of living that includes sufficient food, clean water, primary education, and access to basic health care, we will never deliver effective health care or be able to fight for civil and political rights that truly mean something in the lives of the destitute poor. The poor face pressure from a variety of fronts, and we must consider them all if we are truly going to free them from the bonds that society and history have placed on many peoples and people groups.
From my Catholic perspective, even though Farmer's personal faith is complex (though he is very influenced by Catholic social teaching and liberation theology, both Catholic concepts), he is one of the most radical examples of fighting to protect human life from conception to natural death and everywhere in between, with the notable exception of his approval of contraceptives (which is a tough sell for all but the most Catholic physicians). In myriad ways, he is a radical example of solidarity with the "least of these," and of seeing that every person is made in the image of God and has an innate divine dignity.
December 9, 2010
A very good overview of his work and fairly recent (the essays included span the majority of his career, but it ends with an interview that is right around the publication date). Highly recommend to anyone interested in public health or human rights.
It is long, but is a collection of essays that gives a good idea of the man and his ideas. He explains his views on 'structural violence' better here than in any of his other books. Makes a very solid argument for health as a human right and rallies against 'cost-efficiency' and 'sustainability' in this concern, in true Farmer fashion.
It is long, but is a collection of essays that gives a good idea of the man and his ideas. He explains his views on 'structural violence' better here than in any of his other books. Makes a very solid argument for health as a human right and rallies against 'cost-efficiency' and 'sustainability' in this concern, in true Farmer fashion.
October 4, 2010
Not a book to read in one sitting - the section on structural violence is particularly illuminating.
February 12, 2026
Very interesting. Statistically heavy, but loved the conversation surrounding public & international health. The book touched on tuberculosis, HIV, and wider health topics for those living in Haiti and Rwanda. I would recommend it to someone who wants to question those who are interested in being involved in international health.
November 22, 2013
While Dr Farmer is a hero of mine and much of his thoughts and experiences described in this book are important and interesting, his writing doesn't make for the most compelling reading. The format of a compilation of essays is good and helps emphasize Dr Farmer's compassion, insight, and unrelenting quest for health and social equity.
July 13, 2015
OriginAl revolutionary ideas of health as a right not as a commodity. The practical experience and credibility behind every thought. The compassion for the individual patient , the poor the disadvantaged. Life changing indeed.
May 31, 2015
It took me awhile to get through this book. It is a collection of essays meant more for professional journals. But the effort was well worth it. Paul Farmer is revolutionary in the best sense of the word.
May 8, 2019
I love all things Paul Farmer and greatly enjoy his books.
November 2, 2019
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This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews