Dr. Paul Farmer, a giant in the field of global health, professor at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of the nonprofit Partners In Health, died Monday in Butaro, Rwanda, in a hospital he helped build.
A cause of death has not been announced, but his death was confirmed by Sheila Davis, executive director of Partners in Health, in an email to staff.
Farmer, 62, spent his professional life fighting for quality medical care for people regardless of their income, race or geography. This quest brought him to some of the poorest places in the world, including Rwanda, as it rebuilt from the 1994 genocide, Peru as it battled an epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis, and in Russian prisons overrun with HIV.
He began his medical career in Haiti and helped build a health infrastructure in that country through Partners In Health, which also led a medical response to the devastating 2010 earthquake there.
Farmer, the subject of the 2003 book by Tracy Kidder called “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” also wrote a dozen books of his own on different aspects of global health. His most recent of him, “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History,” focused on his experiences of him and the mistakes he believed were made by his own organization and others in fighting Ebola in West Africa in 2014- 2016.
He was passionate and moving in his speeches, convincing drug companies to lower the price of HIV drugs, patients to follow his advice, and legions of students to enter the field of public health.
“The number and diversity of people whom Paul Farmer inspired to pursue justice through health is simply incalculable,” Jonathan Cohen, a professor of global medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, wrote on Twitter Monday. “This is a titanic loss for global health that will reverberate for generations to come. May we all do justice to his memory of him and example of him.”
Farmer, a University Professor and chairman of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, also pioneered the idea of ”accompaniment” in medicine.
I have established a system for hiring local residents to check up on patients, ensuring that they were taking their medicines and that their basic needs for survival were met. In this way, for instance, patients with few financial resources were able to stick to complicated regimens for treating drug-resistant tuberculosis – which the larger medical community had thought would be impossible.
“Paul Farmer’s loss is devastating, but his vision for the world will live on through Partners in Health,” Davis, of Partners In Health wrote in a statement. “Paul taught all those around him the power of accompaniment, love for one another, and solidarity.”
He and his life and work were also the subject of a 2017 documentary, “Bending the Arc.”
Farmer, who holds a medical degree and a PhD in medical anthropology from Harvard, is survived by his wife, Didi Bertrand Farmer, and their three children.
Contact Karen Weintraub at [email protected].
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism