‘I Just Came Across Kindness’: Humanitarian Paul Farmer Dies

Feb. 22, 2022 — Paul Edward Farmer, MD, a famend infectious illness specialist, humanitarian, and well being care champion for lots of the world’s most susceptible affected person populations, died out of the blue in his sleep from a cardiac occasion Monday in Rwanda, the place he had been instructing. He was 62.

Farmer co-founded the Boston-based world nonprofit Partners in Health and spent many years offering well being care to impoverished communities worldwide, preventing on the frontline to guard underserved communities in opposition to lethal pandemics.

Farmer was the Kolokotrones University professor and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine within the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. He served as chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“Paul dedicated his life to improving human health and advocating for health equity and social justice on a global scale,” Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley mentioned in a letter to the varsity. “I am particularly shaken by his passing because he was not only a consummate colleague and a beloved mentor, but a close friend. To me, Paul represented the heart and soul of Harvard Medical School.”

He was additionally chancellor and co-founder of the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda. Before his loss of life, he had spent the previous a number of weeks instructing on the college.

“Paul Farmer’s loss is devastating, but his vision for the world will live on through Partners in Health,” Sheila Davis, CEO of the nonprofit well being group, mentioned in an announcement. “Paul taught all those around him the power of accompaniment, love for one another, and solidarity. Our deepest sympathies are with his family.”

Farmer was born in North Adams, MA, and grew up in Florida along with his mother and father and 5 siblings. He attended Duke University on a Benjamin N. Duke Scholarship and acquired his medical diploma in 1988, adopted by and his PhD in 1990 from Harvard University.

His humanitarian work started when he was a university scholar volunteering in Haiti in 1983, working with dispossessed farmers. In 1987, he co-founded Partners in Health with the aim of serving to sufferers in poverty-stricken corners of the world.

Under Farmer’s management, the nonprofit tackled main public well being crises: Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru and different nations, and an Ebola outbreak that tore by way of West Africa.

Farmer documented his 2014-2015 expertise treating Africa’s Ebola sufferers in a e-book referred to as Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History.

He wrote that by the point he had arrived, “western Sierra Leone was ground zero of the epidemic, and Upper West Africa was just about the worst place in the world to be critically ill or injured.”

One of his biggest qualities was his skill to attach with sufferers — to deal with them “not like ones who suffered, but like a pal you’d joke with,” mentioned Pardis Sabeti, MD, PhD, a Harvard University geneticist who additionally hung out in Africa and famously sequenced samples of the Ebola virus’s genome.

Sabeti and Farmer bonded over their love for Sierra Leone, together with their grief over shedding a detailed colleague to Ebola: Humarr Khan, who was one of many space’s main infectious illness consultants.

Sabeti first met Farmer years earlier as a first-year Harvard medical scholar when she enrolled in one in every of his programs. She mentioned college students launched themselves, one after the other, every veering into heartfelt testimonies about what Farmer’s work had meant to them.

Farmer and Sabeti had been simply texting on Saturday, and the 2 had been, “goofing around in our usual way, and scheming about how to make the world better, as we always did.”

Farmer was humorous, mischievous, and above all, precisely what you’ll count on upon assembly him, Sabeti mentioned.

“It’s cliché, but the energetic kick you get from just being in his presence, it’s almost otherworldly,” she mentioned. “It’s not even otherworldly in the sense of, ‘I just came across greatness.’ It’s more, ‘I just came across kindness.’”

Farmer’s work has been extensively distributed in publications together with Bulletin of the World Health Organization, The Lancet, TheNew England Journal of Medicine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Social Science and Medicine.

He was awarded the 2020 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the American Medical Association’s Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award, and, along with his Partners in Health colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

He is survived by his spouse, Didi Bertrand Farmer, and their three kids.