Harvard Gazette | Symposium honoring late global health pioneer Paul Farmer reflects on achievements, purpose, influence of Haiti
The Harvard Gazette recently published an article on the symposium reflecting on Paul Farmer's (Harvard Anthropology, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine) legacy. This symposium featured words from Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, among others. A portion of the Harvard Gazette article is below.
Grief fades, and what remained on Monday in a Harvard Medical School conference room was clarity of purpose: to provide healthcare to the world’s poor, to expand capacity so those in even the most impoverished places can care for themselves, and to teach the next generation so the work continues.
Friends, family, and colleagues of Paul Farmer, the Harvard Med professor and co-founder of the nonprofit Partners In Health, gathered to reflect on his legacy and the global influence of his efforts, which began decades ago in Haiti. That island nation changed Farmer’s life when he visited in the early 1980s. The physician and activist died suddenly last year on the grounds of a hospital and university he helped found in Rwanda.
Speakers at the three-hour symposium, “The Uses of Haiti: Paul Farmer and the Origins of the Global Health Equity Movement,” agreed that Farmer’s firsthand experience with Haiti’s poor after graduating from Duke University transformed him. But the reverse was also true: Without Farmer, Haiti likely would not have become a global example of what is possible, both there and — with the help of some of its professionals — in other countries...
...During the panel talks, some of Farmer’s closest associates said he remains a powerful influence on their lives. Some still think of him daily and expressed gratitude for having been able to work beside the man whom Arthur Kleinman, Rabb Professor of Anthropology and professor of psychiatry and Farmer’s adviser during his Harvard studies, described as a “world historical figure.”
“Paul Farmer was an extraordinary individual,” said Kleinman, who is also professor of global health and social medicine. “We started as his mentors and he became our mentor. One of the things that Paul said was that when you’re with a patient, when you’re with someone who needs your assistance, their suffering counts more than your suffering. He had the view that you find yourself as a human being not by going into yourself deeply, but by going out and serving others.”