Paul Farmer (1959-2022)
Filed under the name Paul · October 12, 2026
There is a particular kind of person I find myself unexpectedly moved by, precisely because their story is so unlike my own, and Paul Farmer is very much one of them. A physician and anthropologist, he co-founded Partners In Health and dedicated his career to bringing genuinely high-quality medical care to some of the poorest communities in the world — Haiti, Rwanda, and beyond — not as a charitable gesture from a comfortable distance but as sustained, difficult, on-the-ground work that reshaped how the entire field thinks about health equity. I have never once, in my whole life, had to worry seriously about access to medical care, and I am slowly, at 58, becoming more honest with myself about how rare that particular kind of security actually is. Farmer chose to spend his considerable talents where the need was greatest rather than where the comfort was, which is a choice I suspect I would have found very difficult to make myself. He deserves every ounce of the respect his life's work has earned him.