Paul Farmer, 62, physician, medical anthropologist, and pioneering global health leader, died February 21 in Rwanda. The cause was an acute cardiac event.
Farmer believed that all lives have equal value and that everyone, regardless of circumstance, has a right to first-rate health care. He acted on these beliefs over a lifetime of caring for the neediest while refusing to accept the judgment of critics who insisted his mission wasn't practical or cost-effective or sustainable. Farmer put it this way in a 2018 interview with the Harvard Gazette: "I've been struggling with [this] since I was a student: socialization for scarcity. But scarcity for ourselves? No. Scarcity for our mom? No. For our own kids? No. We're socialized for scarcity for other people, and they're usually black or brown or poor. So, then we start cutting corners."
Through Partners in Health (PIH), a global nonprofit health organization he cofounded in 1987 and led until his death, Farmer's vision of equitable health care has become a reality for people in some of the most medically deprived countries in the world. Working closely with local partners, PIH has established state-of-the-art hospitals, medical and nursing schools, health centers, and community health delivery systems in Haiti, Rwanda, and Peru, among other places.
Farmer especially valued nursing, recognizing the profession as central to building health systems in poor regions, according to Melissa Ojemeni, PhD, RN, director of nursing education, research, and professional development at PIH. "Within his lifetime, Paul truly came full circle in his advocacy and championing of nurses and nursing as a profession," she told AJN, noting that over time, the contributions of nursing and nursing leadership "became central to actualizing PIH's mission: to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care." More than half of the PIH staff today are nurses and midwives, and they deliver the majority of care across the organization's 10 sites, Ojemeni said.
Paul Edward Farmer Jr. was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, on October 26, 1959, one of six children of a schoolteacher father and a mother who worked as a grocery store cashier. He is survived by his wife, medical anthropologist and community health specialist Didi Bertrand Farmer, and their three children, Catherine, Elizabeth, and Sebastian, his mother, two brothers, and three sisters. Beyond his family are the thousands of health care workers around the world whom he taught and inspired and who now continue his work.