Paul Farmer, M.D., a founding director of Partners in Health, an international health organization for the poor, will speak at Yale School of Nursing (YSN) Wednesday, March 31, at 6:30 p.m.
The talk, sponsored by the YSN’s Diversity Action Committee, is titled “Pathologies of Power: Rethinking Health and Human Rights in the Global Era.” The lecture will be in Harkness Auditorium, 333 Cedar St.
Farmer is a medical anthropologist and physician who has dedicated his life to treating some of the world’s poorest populations. In 1987, he helped found Partners in Health, which provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He is a world-renowned authority on tuberculosis (TB) treatment and control and has worked in infectious-disease control for nearly two decades. He pioneered the treatment of both multi-drug resistant TB and HIV in Haiti, and also participated in evaluating TB programs in Russia, Peru, Azerbaijan, Latvia, and Kazakhstan.
Farmer is an attending physician in infectious diseases and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He also is medical director of a hospital in rural Haiti, the Clinique Bon Saveur.
Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti while still a student in 1983. He worked with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau, where he later helped establish Creole for Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante). The initial one-building clinic has grown to a multiservice health complex.
The author and co-author of more than 100 scholarly publications, Farmer has received numerous awards, among them the Duke University Humanitarian Award, the American Medical Association’s International Physician Award, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation award, and the Heinz Award for the Human Condition.
In accepting the Heinz Award, Farmer said, “As members of the world community, we must recognize that we can and should summon our collective resources to save the countless lives that were previously alleged to be beyond our help.”
