It is not hyperbole to say that throughout the world people are mourning the death of Dr. Paul Farmer—physician, anthropologist, humanitarian. Co-founder of Partners in Health, Dr. Farmer gave forty years of his life to drawing attention to the gross inequality of healthcare throughout the world while providing medical education and quality, hands-on care to people in Haiti, Rwanda, Russia and other impoverished areas around the globe. A friend of the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, Dr. Farmer was influenced by liberation theology of which Gutierrez was one of the founders and early articulators. He was a servant and partner of the poor embodying Jesus’ call to accompany the most vulnerable among us. Farmer was the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder’s 2003 Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. Farmer died in his sleep from an acute cardiac event while in Rwanda, on February 21, 2022, at the age of 62.

NPR ~ This I Believe is a national media project aired on NPR that invites Americans from all walks of life to write about and discuss the core beliefs that guide their daily lives. The series is based on the 1950s radio program This I Believe, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow.

This I Believe Health Is A Human Right
December 21, 2008
PAUL FARMER

I believe in health care as a human right. I’ve worked as a doctor in many places, and I’ve seen where to be poor means to be bereft of rights.

I saw early on, still just a medical student, the panicky dead-end faced by so many of the destitute sick: a young woman dying in childbirth; a child writhing in the spasms of a terrible disease for which a vaccine has existed — for more than a century; a friend whose guts were irreparably shredded by bacteria from impure water; an 8 year old caught in cross-fire. Li mouri bet — what a stupid death, goes one Haitian response.

Fighting such “stupid deaths” is never the work of one, or even of a small group. I’ve had the privilege of joining many others providing medical care to people who would otherwise not be able to get it. The number of those eager to serve is impressive, and so is the amount that can be accomplished. I believe that stupid deaths can be averted; we’ve done it again and again. But this hard and painful work has never yet been an urgent global priority.

The fight for health as a human right, a fight with real promise, has so far been plagued by failures. Failure because we are chronically short of resources. Failure because we are too often at the mercy of those with the power and money to decide the fates of hundreds of millions. Failure because ill health, as we have learned again and again, is more often than not a symptom of poverty and violence and inequality — and we do little to fight those when we provide just vaccines, or only treatment for one disease or another. Every premature death, and there are millions of these each year, should be considered a rebuke.

Questions Or Comments?

I know it’s not enough to attend only to the immediate needs of the patient in front of me. We must also call attention to the failures and inadequacy of our own best efforts. The goal of preventing human suffering must be linked to the task of bringing others, many others, into a movement for basic rights.

The most vulnerable — those whose rights are trampled, those rarely invited to summarize their convictions for a radio audience — still believe in human rights, in spite of — or perhaps because of — their own troubles. Seeing this in Haiti and elsewhere has moved me deeply and taught me a great deal.

I move uneasily between the obligation to intervene and the troubling knowledge that much of the work we do, praised as “humanitarian” or “charitable,” does not always lead us closer to our goal. That goal is nothing less than the refashioning of our world into one in which no one starves, drinks impure water, lives in fear of the powerful and violent, or dies ill and unattended.

Of course such a world is a utopia, and most of us know that we live in a dystopia. But all of us carry somewhere within us the belief that moving away from dystopia moves us towards something better and more humane. I still believe this.

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