Physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer is well known for bringing health care to resource-poor areas in Haiti, the foothills of Rwanda, or Boston’s inner city. He argues that access to the basics of food, water, shelter, education and health are human rights. Farmer is an excellent speaker whose pointed remarks are frequently cited. At its root Farmer's philosophy is both medical and moral.
Paul Farmer on Health and Human Rights
- "I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right."
- "The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right."
- "What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable."
- "I can show you all the things that go wrong, not just for the sick but for all of us, when health care is not construed as a basic human right."
- "Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water." (all quotes from Author Interview, University of California Press)
Paul Farmer on Health Care Disparity
- "In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity." (Pathologies of Power, 144)
- "I realized that a minor error in one setting of power and privilege could have an enormous impact on the poor in another." (Mountains Beyond Mountains, 78)
- "Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care."
- "I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths." (Author Interview)
Paul Farmer on Medicine and Social Justice
- "I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick."
- "For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act. " (NYTimes, March 29, 2003)
Championing Health Care as a Human Right: An Interview with Paul Farmer. University of California Press. Web. 23 Aug. 2009.
Farmer, Paul, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Print.
Kidder, Tracy. Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House. 2003. Print.
Q&A, Health Care for the Poorest as a Central Human Right, New York Times, March 23, 2003, Web. 23 Aug. 2009.
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