MCAB brings Paul Farmer to campus

Author: Jaime Fuller

On Feb. 28, well-known medical anthropologist and physician Dr. Paul Farmer will speak at the reopened Social Space in the McCullough Student Center. Farmer is the keynote speaker preceding the global public health symposium to be held from March 5 to 13.

Romany Redman '11, one of the students responsible for organizing the symposium, said that the Speakers' Committee student survey taken this fall was one of the reasons the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) chose Farmer as the second speaker to be financed by the Speakers' Committee.

Quite a few students responded to the questionnaire with Paul Farmer's name, and we thought he would be a great person to approach for our symposium," Redman said.

Farmer is best known for co-founding Partners in Health (PIH), an international charity organization unique in its mission to be both "medical and moral." The organization's vision, according to the PIH Web site, is "based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make them well. […] Whatever it takes. Just as we would do if a member of our own family - or we ourselves - were ill."

PIH began in Haiti in 1987, where a small community clinic started by Farmer and others has grown into the Zanmi Lasante ("Partners In Health" in Haitian Kreyol) Sociomedical Complex, one of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti. In 1998, Zanmi Lasante launched the world's first program to provide free, comprehensive HIV care and treatment in an impoverished area. An article in The New York Times in November 2003 stated, "No program to treat people in the poorest countries has more intrigued experts than the one started in Haiti by Partners In Health."

Farmer remains active in Haiti, where he first became committed to global health and human rights, but has extended the impact of his work to include projects in Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi and Peru.

Farmer has received multiple honors for his contributions to global health research and his philanthropic work, including the Duke University Humanitarian Award, the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the American Medical Association's International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." In 2008 he was named "Social Entrepreneur of the Year" by the Skoll Foundation and was also featured in a segment on CBS's "60 Minutes."

Tracy Kidder, who wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure The World, described Farmer in an interview with Mark Klempner as a man who "gets enormous pleasure from being a doctor, and a lot of that is the altruistic impulse, which some people don't think exists … I do believe altruism exists, and you can see it in him … This is a person who is really in love with the world and who, in proportion, is offended by the horrible flaws in it."

Redman describes Farmer with the same earnest rhetoric.

"He is a leader in the realm of global health, and when people read about his work he becomes a personal hero," she said. "Everybody who knows about him loves him, but not too many people at this school know about him which is one of the reasons why we wanted to bring him."

The symposium, entitled "Healing Humanity: Perspectives on Global Public Health," has taken a long time to be realized since the idea was first conceived last March. Hannah Burnett '10 and Redman have since been working diligently with a few other students to negotiate contracts with speakers and work out the logistical concerns of the comprehensive and event-packed symposium.

Other notable guests scheduled to speak include Senior Fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Dr. Sheri Fink, Alfred Sommer, Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Dennis Raphael, undergraduate program director at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto, Canada. Film screenings, photo exhibits and other social events are also planned for the symposium.