Health activist Paul Farmer to speak at Yale Divinity School

Dr. Paul Farmer

, Harvard Medical School professor and a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), will deliver a lecture titled “The Corporal Works of Mercy and the 21st-Century Struggle Against Poverty” at Yale Divinity School on Thursday, April 26. Free and open to the public, the lecture begins at 6 p.m. in Marquand Chapel of Yale Divinity School, 409 Prospect St.

Farmer, an anthropologist and physician and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, is well-known for his work with PIH—an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of the poor and medically under-served.

He is also chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and served for 10 years as medical director of a charity hospital, L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti. He and his colleagues in the United States and abroad have pioneered novel, community-based delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings.  In addition, Farmer is the U.N. deputy special envoy for Haiti, under special envoy Bill Clinton.

Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights and about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. His most recent book is “Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader.” Other titles include “Pathologies of Power,” “Infections and Inequalities,” “The Uses of Haiti,” and “AIDS and Accusations.” He is the recipient of numerous health and humanitarian awards, and in 1993 he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award.

Co-sponsoring the event are Yale Divinity School (through the Office of the Dean and the Samuel Thorne and Zenas Crane lectureships), the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale, and the Yale Medical Humanities Lecture Series.