Profile in Courage: Dr. Paul Farmer

In this coronavirus-ravaged world, stories are told of healthcare heroes who go the extra mile (or ten) to make sure their patients have all the care they need. One of the biggest heroes of them all was the recently deceased Dr. Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer worked tirelessly to ensure that patients were not denied care because they had the misfortune of being born in the wrong place and time. This dedication to international healthcare access inevitably brought Dr. Farmer in conflict with global taxpayer-funded bureaucracies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), who were not always supportive of lifesaving treatment programs. Dr. Farmer made sure that patients’ lives was prioritized over always following WHO protocols and adhering to “official” guidelines. For saving countless lives and inspiring an international revolution in healthcare access, Dr. Farmer was most certainly a Profile in Courage.

From an early age, Dr. Farmer realized that not everyone is fortunate enough to have ready reliable access to first-rate healthcare services. His family may not have had much to their name, but they were resourceful. For five years, he lived with his parents and five siblings in a tuberculosis mobile clinic converted into a mobile home. They even temporarily lived in a boat moored in a Gulf Coast bayou. In college, Dr. Farmer began his tireless efforts to help impoverished people live a life free of constant hardship. He journeyed to Haiti to work with dispossessed farmers.  And, once he realized the abysmal state of healthcare in-country, Dr. Farmer opted to serve at a charity hospital there for ten years. Just four years after the start of his fateful trip to Haiti, Dr. Farmer decided that isolated acts of goodwill would not be sufficient to affect global change. In 1987, he co-founded the non-profit healthcare organization Partners In Health (PIH) to not only provide healthcare services to those in need, but also research and advocate for better treatment systems.

PIH rejected the idea that non-profits should only strive to deliver basic healthcare services in developing countries such as Haiti. A fever-ridden little girl in Port-au-Prince is just as deserving of care as her bedridden cousin in Brooklyn, New York. That basic realization motivated Dr. Farmer and his colleagues to regularly haul suitcases filled with medications from the U.S. to impoverished villages. Witnessing the devastation wrought by an earthquake in Haiti in 2010, PIH built a hospital in the capital and made sure that local doctors were in the best position possible to help overwhelmed patients.

Unfortunately, not everyone consistently rallied behind Dr. Farmer’s efforts. The WHO balked at the idea of providing illiterate Haitians with HIV medication, fearing they would mess up their doses. But the good doctor believed in the people he was serving and doled out the much-needed medications along with usage charts that tracked the sun’s position in the sky. Part of this medication outreach effort also involved hiring “accompaniers” to trek through remote parts of the country and assist people in taking their regimens.

Like many prominent doctors, Dr. Farmer had plenty of prestigious posts and titles. He was chair of the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as chief of the division of global health equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He accumulated quite a few grants over the years, including the MacArthur Foundation award in 1993. But, he never let this institutional acclaim get to his head. Dr. Farmer was always on the frontlines making sure that no one was getting left behind in the constant battle against devastating diseases. For going the extra ten miles to treat the world, Dr. Paul Farmer was a Profile in Courage.