Paul Farmer, an American medical doctor and medical anthropologist renowned for his impressive get the job done in offering wellness care to poorer nations around the world, died Monday at age 62, his nonprofit group Associates in Health explained.
The Boston-dependent firm said he “unexpectedly handed absent right now in his rest though in Rwanda.”
“Paul Farmer’s loss is devastating, but his eyesight for the entire world will dwell on via Companions in Health,” the group’s CEO Dr. Sheila Davis explained in a statement. “Paul taught all those all-around him the electric power of accompaniment, adore for one particular yet another, and solidarity.”
Farmer’s get the job done on giving overall health treatment alternatives to poorer nations brought him vast acclaim. A 2003 book profiling him, “Mountains Past Mountains,” known as him “the man who would overcome the planet.”
Tributes to Farmer’s legacy poured in on social media from all around the world.
Samantha Electricity, the previous U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted that Farmer was “a large” in his field.
“Devastating news,” she posted. “Paul Farmer gave every little thing — every little thing — to others. He observed the worst, and nevertheless did all he could to convey out the most effective in everyone he encountered.”
“It is difficult to overstate the affect Dr. Paul Farmer had on the medical career,” pulmonologist and healthcare analyst Dr. Vin Gupta tweeted
“This is over and above devastating. Paul was a hero, a mentor and a pal,” Brown University’s Dr. Ashish K. Jha tweeted. “He taught us what world wide health and fitness should really be and influenced all of us to do far better.”
And actor Edward Norton, a social and environmental activist, known as Farmer “1 of the most loving, amusing, generous & inspiring folks to grace humanity with his soul in our lifetimes.”
Doing the job in Haiti in 1987, Farmer co-launched Associates in Wellness to assistance devise and produce greater health care in very poor and terribly underserved nations.
A co-founder and close longtime associate was Jim Yong Kim, who went on to direct the Entire world Lender from 2012 to 2019. In 2009, Farmer succeeded Kim as chair of the Department of World Wellbeing and Social Drugs at Harvard Medical School. The very same year he was named a UN deputy particular envoy to Haiti, performing with Monthly bill Clinton.
Farmer held that placement at the time of the island’s devastating 2010 earthquake, and quickly was headed to Haiti on an airplane whole of physicians.
Farmer, a lifelong advocate for the inadequate Caribbean country, co-established the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and labored with local leaders to open a fashionable training healthcare facility in Mirebalais, in central Haiti, in 2013.
He talked with CBS News chief health-related correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook about the task in 2012, when the medical center was nonetheless beneath building.
“We want to be equipped to say, just when, that the quality of care we are giving to men and women living in abject poverty is as good as if they were being born in some ritzy aspect of Manhattan, say. That eyesight of fairness and justice and decency is what we would like to give birth to,” Farmer mentioned.
“What a crushing loss,” LaPook reported Monday.
Farmer was editor in chief of the journal Well being and Human Legal rights, and wrote extensively on the juncture of all those two fields.
Farmer was also main of the division of Worldwide Well being Fairness at Brigham and Women’s Clinic, in Boston, Massachusetts.
He, Kim and an additional Partners in Wellness co-founder, Ophelia Dahl — daughter of British author Roald Dahl and American actress Patricia Neal — are featured in a 2017 documentary, “Bending the Arc.”
In addition to Rwanda and Haiti, Partners in Health and fitness functions in Kazakhstan, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mexico, Peru, Russia and Sierra Leone, as nicely as in Navajo communities in the United States.
Farmer was married to Didi Bertrand Farmer, a Haitian clinical anthropologist.
In 2008, Farmer invited “60 Minutes” to central Haiti, in which he found his life’s get the job done. The invitation meant a three-hour, jaw clenching, teeth rattling trip on an unpaved road from the capital town to the clinic. Observe the video clip beneath:
