Paul Farmer

American medical anthropologist, physician and humanitarian who had a profound effect on world health. The subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2004 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Farmer spent his time between Harvard University where he taught and rural hospitals in impoverished nations, first in Haiti and since 2004 in Rwanda. Co-founder of Partners in Health, Farmer’s mission was to address the injustices of poverty that are perpetuated by the inequality in health care. He was a critic of the Bush administration’s policy on withholding aid to Haiti, saying, "Why are we blocking assistance to the poorest country? It’s bizarre, unfair and doesn’t reflect the American people’s will."

Second-oldest of six children, his upbringing was unconventional, with much of his childhood spent in an old school bus that became a mobile home in a trailer park in Birmingham, Alabama. His strong-willed father, nicknamed "The Warden", later moved the family onto a rebuilt boat, moored in a Florida Gulf Coast bayou. A brilliant student, Farmer won a scholarship to Duke University where he studied anthropology and became interested in Haiti. When he traveled there in 1983, he committed himself to doing something about the destitute conditions he found. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Duke in 1982, he went to Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1984. In 1987, he co-founded Partners in Health to treat the sick and train health workers in the poorest part of central Haiti. With his doctorate in medicine and medical anthropology from Harvard, he became professor of social medicine at the university as well as chairman of the division of social medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He learned French, Haitian Creole and Spanish, and in 1993, he won a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" which he gave to Partners in Health. In 2002, he did the same with a $250,000 Heinz Foundation Award.