Thinkers Timeline

Paul Farmer (1959-2022) was an American physician, anthropologist, and global health activist. He was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, and grew up in modest and at times difficult circumstances, living for a period on a bus and then on a boat in Florida with his large family. He studied anthropology and medicine at Harvard University. In 1983, while still a student, he began working in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and never stopped. He co-founded Partners in Health in 1987, an organisation that has built health systems in Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Liberia, Mexico, Peru, Kazakhstan, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere, demonstrating that high-quality healthcare could be delivered to the poorest communities on earth. He was a professor at Harvard Medical School, spent much of his time in Haiti, and travelled constantly between his field work, his Harvard obligations, and advocacy in international health policy. He died in his sleep in Rwanda in 2022 at the age of sixty-two, after a lifetime of working eighteen-hour days while sleeping in basic conditions and eating simply to remain as close as possible to the people he served.